What can we do?

by Ingrid Robeyns on November 9, 2016

We could wait to post something here on the Trump Election until we have processed the shock. But we should have a place to discuss how to make sense of this, and think about how to go from here. So here are my two cents; I am sure other Timberites will give us more matured reactions later.

I listened to Trump’s speech this morning. The good thing is that he was no longer, as an agitator, telling people to now go and find Hillary and all those evil journalists and teach them a lesson. He even thanked Hillary for all the hard work she had done. But will his supporters also be able to make the switch he made between Trump-the-Campaigner to Trump-the-President? He called for national unity, even though to my ears, it didn’t sound sincere. How can it sound sincere, after such a (verbally) violent campaign?

As to substance, his only plan is a nationalistic economic plan. And he’s even too cowardly (or uncaring about being honest or consistent) to tell his voters that this will only be possible by massively raising taxes (or will he first invade some other countries, and get the money there?) Trump wants jobs for everyone, which is a good thing – although he only mentioned jobs in public infrastructure works, which sounds like predominantly jobs for men. But then we know how much he cares about women’s interests.

He has also announced a tougher stance internationally. This is really worrying. Given his wicked character, the constant lies, the complete disrespect for facts, and his taking fun in bullying people and insulting them – how will he act as a word leader, or even, more modestly, as a player in foreign affairs? We should take seriously the risk of a Trump presidency ending in a large international conflict. The US voters elected Trump, but it will affect the rest of the world too.

Perhaps the greatest significance of Trump’s speech was the issues about which he did not speak. Nothing on moral leadership, reducing global inequalities, increasing the quality of public education, combatting unequal opportunities, making sure people are not just having jobs but also are not being poor, support for the disabled and vulnerable citizens, public policies to protect the non-material dimensions of the quality of life, and, – for humanity at large, the horrible issue of having zero ambitions to do something about climate change, let alone to take responsibility for harms already done. And for the US, there is of course the issue of the Supreme Court.

So, if this is what’s waiting for us, what can progressives do? How can we get into a conversation with those who voted for Trump? How can we address their legitimate concerns while convincing them that Trump’s promised policies are not the solution? How can we organise nationally and internationally?

Thanks Ingrid. I am suggesting to everyone I talk to that left wing people should support each other, but more particularly, look out for vulnerable groups. I think Trump’s election is a sign of America’s declining power in the world, at a hard-headed level, but in the short term there will be some very hard times for some groups, especially low income women and people of colour, probably.

‘How can we address their legitimate concerns while convincing them that Trump’s promised policies are not the solution?

Talk to working class white workers and tell them – that it wasn’t the US government which gave their jobs away but US companies and cooperations.

‘How can we organise nationally and internationally?’

Get our traditionally constituency – the working class white workers – back on our side – by
not supporting Trump in any effort to bring manufacturing and the jobs of the workers back – but by having our economists come up with ‘job creating programs’ which are far more progressive than Trumps programs ever could be!

Not only Trump, the Republicans have the House and the Senate too. This hasn’t had much media attention yet. Trying to find some hope, at least that means the Trump will have no-one else to blame for his failures when they come.

@2 ingrid: his talk is about 45m, the rest is for questions. Blyth connects what he calls ‘left’ (Corbyn, Sanders, Syriza, etc.) and ‘right’ (Le Pen, Orban, True Finns, Trump, etc.) Trumpism, explaining how they are both responses to the socio-political choices that western governments have been making over the past 35-40 years, how these responses overlap/differ, and what that suggests for politics down the line. Includes a history of the macroeconomic developments since WW2, including a discussion of Keynes and Kalecki, how/why Keynesianism was abandoned in favor of supply-side nonsense, how that relates to financial deregulation, the changes to monetary policy-making (-> caring only about inflation levels).

Manta – I am not based in the US so may not know what you are referring to. But let me just give you one example of what I have in mind. The oppressed groups around the world, and those whose basic liberties have been violated by oppressive regimes, can be supported by a US president who takes the issue of human rights seriously. Trump does not. It is hence no surprise that the first reactions from the Kremlin and from Turkey are positive. Trump won’t bother Putin or Erdogan if they keep violating the basic human rights of their citizens. That’s the opposite of moral leadership.

Ingrid, thanks for this very calm post. I couldn’t never have written something as measured and cool-headed so soon.

The good thing is that he was no longer […] an agitator

My theory, that I never ever thought would undergo empirical testing, has long been that Trump is supremely uninterested in ruling, just turning the White House into Trump House and fantasize all day about how hot is wife and daughter are. If correct, this means that his appointees will do the real work, and as I expect him to appoint hardline rightwing crooks and charlatans, that is no good news.

The two defining issue of our time for the left are-in my opinion-climate change internationally and the meteoritic rise of inequalities domestically. On both issues, the Trump administration will be a massive step backwards.

@9 Ingrid: I’m sure he won’t, but what support has been forthcoming from Obama? Has the US supported the Rojava Kurds? No, because doing so would “offend” NATO Ally Turkey. Does the US object to the KSA’s war on Yemen? No, they actually support it. Has invading Libya and helping kill Khadaffi doen anything for the Libyans? No, the country is a total mess, and an ISIS/AQ training ground. And that’s not even counting ongoing US interventions in S-Am, support for Honduran violence, etc. Sure, Trump won’t be any better, but I’m having rather a hard time with the very notion of the US providing “Moral Leadership”.

The simple but not easy task: to take economic populism back from the Republicans. It’s not easy because it will require the dismantling of the Clintonista/DLC/Third Way coterie and the elevation of people like Warren and Sanders to positions of power within the party. It’s simple because, all things being equal, the Republicans cannot beat a Democrat who credibly represents the poor, the worker, and the middle class.

Ingrid @11
I am not from USA either, but expecting the USA to help “the oppressed groups around the world” is more of a fantasy than reality.
The USA takes human right violations seriously only when it’s done by regimes that are already its adversaries.
The talk about “responsibility to protect” was nothing more than a cover for the Libyan war, not a serious policy.

Where you may have a point is on global warming: Obama was leading the world in the right direction (and I am afraid that Trump will push in the opposite direction).

Sanders and Warren are old. If Sanders wants to rejoin the party then maybe serving as senior minority member on a major committee might not be the worst thing ever but we are fooling ourselves if we think the public will even notice.

The Democratic Party’s southern collapse proved fatal this year. Yes that collapse was 100% due to racism but even so it must be rectified. Our Senate candidates in FL and NC were also rans. We need to build a bench there and fast.

Stop using the white working class as scapegoats for a terrible economy. That is literally what you’d always accused Republicans of doing (using minorities as a scapegoat), and somehow you all don’t seem to realize that you’re doing it, too, but that’s why you lost this election.

The same conditions without 4 years of every liberal on social media talking about how evil white working class people (particularly men) are, and you get a President HRC. If you’d actually managed to repair the economy of the lower classes, you’d have a President HRC. Instead, you pointed to the white working class, screaming, ‘This is all their fault!’, and now are acting shocked that it got people’s backs up.

Funny thing? Under Obama the (white, thought this always seems to be implied) working class saw its first income gains in a decade.

And yet the (white) working class (and not any other portion of the working class) was eager to throw it all away for a few cracks about Mexicans. This is not blame. I cannot blame people for being in the grip of a 500 year old ideology they don’t understand.

It is however a fact. The sooner we realize that we can’t just whip up another tech boom and in the absence of that blessed event race Trumps class, the better.

If there are people who voted for Trump (and his fellow Republicans) on the premise that he would improve their economic lot in life, they are going to be very disappointed. The most likely economic agenda – the agenda that has been spelled out clearly – is tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, elimination of the estate tax, deregulation of the health insurance industry resulting in the loss of access to affordable health insurance, a tax holiday for corporations who keep their profits overseas, deregulation of the financial industry, cuts to social security and Medicare and the revival of attempts to privatize both.

Unlike Tim Reynolds @20, I don’t think that “messages” make a difference: in particular, “The same conditions without 4 years of every liberal on social media talking about how evil white working class people (particularly men) are, and you get a President HRC” seems off base.

However, if I did believe that propaganda makes much of a difference, I would agree with him: calling someone “deplorables” will not convince them to vote for you (just like Romney painting half the country as lazy moochers was not a good idea).

More importantly, screaming “racists” will not help in finding solutions: it will only prepare for more unpleasant surprises (we saw it with the Brexit vote, we are seeing it again with Trump election).

An actually existing institution that cares about human right violation is the EU: there are quite a few rules about human rights that states that want to join have to follow, and they are (mostly) enforced.
Notice that this has nothing do to with human right violations in, say, Saudi Arabia, where the EU policy is like the USA one: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@5 ‘ while cheerfully snubbing the people who said “new left” has dumped by the way-side’

Mark Blyth at it’s best – and there is an even better analysis of the situation by Mark Blyth under the fitting title: ‘Global Trumpism’ – which explains it all… like the story of a once proud (white) worker who ends up in walmart.

And about ‘racism’ – yes for sure ‘racism’ but as stated before white workers seem to forget their ‘racism’ if they got some (well paying) jobs which keep them busy – and thus some purpose in life – and why does it seem to be so difficult for ‘some’ to understand?

No one is “screaming” racists. The word is not an epithet. It is a simply a description of the people who vote for a man who’s opening argument for becoming leader of the free world was “Mexico is sending rapists.”

Enough marginalizing the people who have warned about this. We aren’t being emotional. We’re just paying attention.

The US did exercise moral leadership once, in liberating Western Europe from the yoke of fascist tyranny.

If any of you western europeans would like to return the favor now, I promise to greet you with flowers.

Was the Dems’ debacle due to a failure to understand the lower class? Was it a racist backlash against 8 years of Obama? Was it a misogynistic refusal to accept a woman as chief executive?

It was all of these, surely. We thought we had a coalition that could stop Trump. But many white women voted for a man who clearly hates women, and a surprising number of black voters failed to oppose a man whose racism was louder and clearer than George Wallace’s. The whole coalition crumbled, and only the white supremacists voted as a coherent bloc.

Oh joy. It looks like the next few months on the left will be consumed by the intersectionality of blame.

“And about ‘racism’ – yes for sure ‘racism’ but as stated before white workers seem to forget their ‘racism’ if they got some (well paying) jobs which keep them busy – and thus some purpose in life – and why does it seem to be so difficult for ‘some’ to understand?”

Trump won a majority of those with good-paying jobs, and lost a majority of those with low-paying jobs. ‘Low-income’ is not the broadest description of those who voted for Trump – ‘white’ is.

@20
‘Instead, you pointed to the white working class, screaming, ‘This is all their fault!’, and now are acting shocked that it got people’s backs up.’

Don’t know who you addressed – but as an advocate of the white working class – and being aware – that the Rust Belt would decide this election – there was just NOT enough screaming: This is all the Corporations and Outsourcers Fault -(Trump being one of them)

And so the (lost) white workers of the Rust somehow thought it was all ‘the governments’ -(or the politicians) fault.

I suspect that a constant barrage of talk about ‘racism’, ‘white men’, ‘legacy of slavery’ and so on wears people thin. A barely employed white guy in the rust belt who is struggling to keep a roof over his head must have found it galling to feel like they are getting the blame for everything wrong in the US. I think Sanders understood this, and would have won the election.

I am also intrigued to know how Latino turnout will actually look when the numbers have been crunched.

White men of all classes have been weary of talk of “racism” ever sense the term lost it’s original social cachet maybe around 1940?
The reason for this is…. racism. The utter contempt for the very notion that being treated like second class citizens is something for the browns to get all uppity about.

@RNB
Yes, I noticed immediately this a.m. on looking at WaPo tally right under the banner headline that HRC won the popular vote, at least as of the current count. Maybe Electoral College abolition or reform will get a boost from this election, though wdn’t hold my breath on that.

@36 alfred: yes, it’s terrible that they won a trifecta. I’d hoped for 4 more years of gridlock myself, as a least-worst outcome. But this is very much on the Dems, as those at the top consciously decided to put everything on “My Turn” Clinton, to the detriment of all down-ballot candidates.

‘Low-income’ is not the broadest description of those who voted for Trump – ‘white’ is.’

That’s why the expression ‘Low-income’ wasn’t used – and let me repeat ‘again’ what has been mentioned now quite some times.

The fact that an Insane Racist Birther promised Americas angry workers to ‘bring their jobs back’ – obviously was a very ‘winning’ argument – was noticeable from his first rally – and the first debate on – and it is very disappointing that this traditional ’cause’ of the left was stolen by F…face von Clownstick – AND that we allowed him to run with it and win!

is not the broadest description of those who voted for Trump – ‘white’ is.

nastywoman (@28): “white workers seem to forget their ‘racism’ if they got some (well paying) jobs which keep them busy”

Is there any evidence that this is true?

Internationally, white westerners are the richest humans who have ever walked the earth. Yet, collectively, they remain at best indifferent to and at worst actively supportive of the exploitation and industrial murder of non-white non-westerners. (All this despite the reigning ideologies of Christian universalism and its secular counterpart, liberal humanism.) Intra-nationally, wealthy Americans are far more racist—in both senses: personally bigoted and able to implement discriminatory policy—than members of the working class.

While it’s true that economic downturns can exacerbate racism, it does not follow that economic upturns mitigate or diminish racism. We cannot buy our way out of the white supremacy that capitalism fosters. We cannot simply bribe our way to egalitarianism.

Whether liberal, conservative, or neoliberal, capitalism cannot defend itself from fascism. Even social democracy in Scandinavia could not defend itself from neoliberal encroachment. Capitalism tills this earth, plants these seeds, and waters this soil, and it always will. International communism is the only thing that has ever had a fighting chance at achieving what our compassionate priests and liberal professionals sweetly drone on about.

Liberals need to come to grips with the radical left’s criticism of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. I would love to see left radicals getting more airtime on CT, and I bet I’m not alone in desiring this. Certainly a weblog is not the best venue for real-life organizing, but I don’t see why it can’t be an organ for agitation and education.

– and I don’t want to congratulate kidneystones at all – as he suggested to vote for an obvious Insane Fascist – while pointing to the very sane and reasonable work of Arlie Hochschild.

Noticing the ‘Deep Truth’ of the peoples plight doesn’t have to lead to fascistic solutions – and from building walls to banning immigrants because of their religion – F…face von Clownstick offers such obvious fascistic solutions that to vote for them only can be excused by completely ignorant of how it worked out before…

I should have added “Screaming fascist will not help in finding solutions, it will only demean the meaning of the world (unless you seriously think that Trump now that he **sé in power will imprison and kill his political opponents and outlaw the Democratic Party: then feel free to scream fascist)”.

We need to build a bigger coalition and draw people in, which starts with listening to them. In 2012 Obama won Ohio by 50-48. In 2016 Clinton lost 52-44. That’s a lot of people willing to vote for Obama and not Clinton.

In the short term, stand up for what we believe in and pick smart fights. Flailing around and attacking friend and foe is harmful. And stop the end of the world hyperbole: just as with Brexit, the reality is hard enough without squandering credibility on predicting doom that doesn’t materialize.

further to my comment at 45, sorry to be so testy. Where I’m coming from is that calling Trump insane sheds heat but no light, and we really need light here. If he were insane, he wouldn’t be responsible, we couldn’t call him to account.

I post from Europe – where ‘Fascists’ are still called ‘Fascists’ if they fit the definition –
and European ‘Fascists’ are not allowed (anymore) to imprison or kill political opponents or outlaw ‘Democratic Parties’ – but that doesn’t make them less ‘fascistic’.

I think claiming that it’s all about racism is inadequate. If it’s all about racism, then how do we on the left even start to attack it?

Further, I don’t believe that Deindustralization has nothing to do with it. It’s not just economics, it’s also atomization. The end of a pretty cool way of life where you have nice things and its replacement with a much worse one where you don’t have nice things.

In general my first thought is that we should wait for a proper analysis of who Trump’s supporters are, figure out which of them are simply impossible, and which of them we can prize away.

CT was an invaluable community, one of the few spaces where the left and liberals could engage across the ideological chasm, doing productive battle, teaching, learning, persuading, shifting perspectives. With the events of the last 24 hours, the repudiation of several liberal assumptions, I think spaces like that become even more important.

Many imagined CT was a commons, shrunk away on learning that it had its owners. It would be a kindness to learn we could come back, and that our labour would not be taken for granted. These are scary, angry times. People across the planet need to think and work together.

—
With Lynne, I worry for js. and RNB and countless others who find themselves anxious in these times. May you find strength and refuge in community.

Moral leadership are two words that scare me already independent of who says them. If any American president says them they scare me a lot. If Trump ignores things happening in Russia or Turkey, thats good news, as its much better than any active response that can be expected from US presidents.

Tim Reynolds@20: there’s a thoughtful article in the Guardian todayhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals
which is worth reading alongside your comment. Note particularly:
“How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

That Vox article that alfredlordbeep links to above is a pretty good, and quite optimistic, summary of the immediate impact of President Trump. It’s closer to reality than the TPM lead piece right now titled “Ryan’s Vision of Conservatism is Dead”. I’d guess that some variation of the Ryan Plan (aka The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise), probably a much meaner version, will be part of Trump’s first 100 days. We’ll be discussing vouchers and block grants soon and what’s left of the New Deal is going to look very different by April 1, 2017. Who’s going to stop a meaner Ryan plan from going through? Certainly not the Congress we have in front of us.

A big tell for me going forward is . . . is Trump going to move to prosecute Clinton? His crowd was chanting “Lock Her Up!” shortly before his victory speech last night. (And, from what I can tell, similar crowds across the country, probably following the NYC crowd’s lead, were chanting the same.) Trump has pledged, both at the last debate and at rally’s across the country to jail Clinton. At the debate he said “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. Because there have never been so many lies, so much deception . . .” Giuliani is, apparently, going to be the next Attorney General. Conway has been asked several times about the special prosecutor appointment pledge and has been noncommittal about it. I’d guess that it might be a somewhat smart move for the Trump administration to go after Clinton, something like Bush appointing Ashcroft to the DoJ. It would be a lightning rod for criticism, deflecting attention away from Trump and at the same time he’d be be able to say he was fulfilling his campaign promise. I have trouble seeing what the downside might be for Trump in going after Clinton.

If Clinton is sitting in a jail by the middle of next year . . . all bets are off as to where this will end up. Also, I can’t imagine Trump sitting around waiting for various investigations into Trump and Trump businesses to run their course. He’s got the power (again, who is going to stop him?) to turn those off and he will.

Depressingly enough, I would not say that “We should take seriously the risk of a Trump presidency ending in a large international conflict.” That sentence might be accurate if it read “We should take seriously the risk of a Trump presidency _beginning_ in a large international conflict.”

Trump doesn’t have a private army. Hitler had two–the SA and the SS.
Trump doesn’t have a political party. He is a Republican, and the Republicans control both houses of Congress, but he isn’t a master of the Republican Party (yet) the way Hitler dominated the Nazis.

All that said, we should all be aware of Ernst Thalmann’s complacency–and his fate.

In a nutshell, this was the revolt of the rednecks and this time the rednecks won. The last time that happened (on a regional level) it got pretty ugly. No reason to think it will be any different this time. How much distance is there between Ann Coulter’s four grandparents voting qualification (yesterday) and the grandfather clauses of various Southern States (invalidated in Guinn v. US (1915))?

Alesis http://crookedtimber.org/2016/11/09/what-can-we-do/#comment-697572
Sanders and Warren are old … we need to build up the bench. But look at the candidates this year.
Yes. Obama was it seems was a once of. Why are there no younger politicians of quality being created? In many ways it was unfortunate that Hillary ran, as it seems to me, if she didn’t run then Warren would have, and whatever else they might have accused here of, it wouldn’t have been, being too close to Wall Street. But next time Warren will be definitely too old.

I’ve long been a supporter of basic income, it is the only serious policy to combat inequality that really hasn’t been tried. Going back to the 1960s (protectionism and unions) doesn’t really seem a serious option to me (for a start because of automation, but also for environmental reasons). Spread the money around, stop concentrating it.

The U.S. Democratic Party pretty much demolished itself. The process was in motion for a long time and involved a lot of self-deception among its partisans about its declining credibility as the party of the people and the devisive turn its rhetoric on racism and feminism had taken in covering for its economic betrayals.

A tip of my hat to Kidneystones. I was wrong in my judgments about how the dynamics would add up. He was right.

As a fan of what might be called “cybertheory” I would note that the Trump campaign was anything but organized and would argue against such a program. Just kidding, I don’t understand the twitter and facebook world yet either, but a grass roots politics based on decentralization and distribution of power seems to have emerged before our eyes.

I am not saying the days of organization in politics is completely over yet, but material conditions may be getting too complicated, and the populace too atomized and anti-authoritarian for old style politics to be of much use.

“How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus.”

Well, that’s rubbish already.

If there was any journalistic consensus, it was that the most important story in the world was what Hillary had or had not done with some emails. This story received far more press than Trump’s sexual assaults, his multiple bankruptcies, his indebtedness to Russian oligarchs, his repeated fraud with contractors, and on and on. Emails also received far more scrutiny than considerations of the actual consequences of either presidency–the affect on climate change, the affect on abortion rights, and so on and so forth.

So, I’m sorry Stephen, but any analysis that starts by saying that the media elites conspired to support Hillary is just flatly refuted by the evidence of the coverage.

PA, WI, and MI were the killers. Florida goes back and forth. But the other three had been blue for four cycles. Everyone expected Hillary to win them. That’s why, even if Trump took a Florida or an Ohio, we all expected a Hillary victory. The post-mortem must focus on what went wrong in those states.

I’m not sure why kidneystones should be thanked, or even congratulated. Before the new comments policy here, his contributions were pretty consistently nasty, personally insulting, and contemptuous of those with whom he disagreed. That his candidate won the election does not seem a sufficient reason to forget his past behavior here.

White people are a majority and apparently a big majority of actual voters for the foreseeable future. If they want policies which some think are racist then maybe we have to at least do some of what they want. Or maybe not. Obama won twice and the white share of the electorate was larger.

I really think it wasn’t the Dem policy platform (i.e. not progressive enough. not “centrist”) which was rejected. This was a repudiation of Clinton as a candidate and the “establishment” with which she is identified. People wanted “change”. Maybe no Democratic candidate could have been enough change because the Dems are coming off two terms. But Obama’s approval ratings are so high that it seems like the result couldn’t be a repudiation of his time in office.

Maybe this was a reaction against “woke bae”ism. The silent majority apparently don’t like being looked down on by smug, self righteous people from celebrities to politicians to people in the media.

@64: Press coverage of Trump was overwhelmingly negative. He got virtually no endorsements, and the most prominent Republican opinion voices – everyone from Glenn Beck to David Brooks – were openly hostile to him. There really was a hermetically sealed world-view, quite similar to how Brexit was portrayed. And this matters because you can’t avoid a disaster if you can’t recognize that it’s coming at you.

“I post from Europe – where ‘Fascists’ are still called ‘Fascists’ if they fit the definition –
and European ‘Fascists’ are not allowed (anymore) to imprison or kill political opponents or outlaw ‘Democratic Parties’ – but that doesn’t make them less ‘fascistic’.”

Can you be more precise about whom you are talking about? Would you give some example of those European Fascists? Are you referring to some 10% party with little or no power (the obviously they will not imprison anybody, having no power…)?

I judge a major party or politician from what it does when he is in power (or what he would do were it in power).
In US Trump is the President, and his party controls (or will contro soon) all branches of the Federal Government: which are those “fascist” policies that you think Trump will implement?
How do they differ from the policies implemented in many European countries (I am thinking of immigration) and from the standard policies of the Republican Party and from the policies usually advocated from the Left (here I am thinking of his stance on free trade)?
Most of his policies seem to me confused and fuzzy, so it’s a quite difficult for me to call them Fascists (or non-Fascist, for that matter), so I would appreciate some clarification.

How come Obama won twice, while Hillary lost? Did voters become more “racist”?
On his first election, Obama was against a Republican after the disastrous Bush presidency, so one may chalk it as an exception: but his second mandate?

It cannot be because the press was for Trump (like supposedly the press was for Bush against Gore): the overwhelming judgement from the press is
“Here is what we do know: We know Mr. Trump is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history. We know that by words and actions, he has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people…” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/opinion/donald-trumps-revolt.html

It cannot be because of money: Clinton had more money and better organization than Trump.

Regarding kidenystone, he’s a good example of my comment above: insulting people is not a good strategy to convince them (even if you are right on the merit).

Trump’s climate change non-policy only leads to disaster iff:
1. What the the rest of the world does depends on what the Unites States does.
2. What the United States does depends entirely on the federal government.

Point 2 is largely true of electricity generation – but that’s where most progress has already been made, with wind and solar replacing fossil fuels very largely for new build, and beginning to cut into the legacy generating park. Anther two very large wedges are buildings and transport. States and cities can do a great deal here; California has been more important in growing evs than federal tax breaks. Cities write building codes, run bus fleets, license taxis, and can set up low-emission zones if they chose. This is more efficient with federal support and coordination, but it can be done without it.

As damn few have pointed out before Nov 8th the probable result of Republican control of all branches of government boils down, in David Dayen’s words, to this snippet:

Even today, the media assists Ryan when he tries to distance himself from Donald Trump—when in reality, Trump would likely be little more than an autopen as president, signing whatever noxious policy Ryan shuttled through the House and put on his desk. Despite this, the media almost affords him sympathy for his plight about dealing with Trump (he’s campaigning with Trump on Saturday, so it can’t be that wrenching), rather than recognizing his role as the author of the agenda the next Republican president will carry out.

The normalization of Ryan as a serious, honest figure allows him to put out as radical a budget as would ever be initiated in American history without anyone batting an eyelash. This may not come back to sting the country next year, if Trump falls the way his poll numbers currently suggest. But at some not-too-distant point*, when conservatives capture the entire government, they’ll be able to implement this blueprint, the Ryan budget, that should have been made into nuclear waste long ago.

@39: Nonsense. Clinton has spent years campaigning for Democrats up and down the ballot and she spoke frequently of the need to build up the party at state and local levels, where it has languished during the Obama decade.

@68: Also nonsense. Trump benefited from celebrity-level media coverage throughout the primaries and well into the election. He made himself more available than other candidates because nothing he said stuck to him and for a long time none of his press interlocutors gave him a very hard time; they were well pleased to have him there. As oldster points out at #64, Trump sleaze stories got little traction because they were seen as dog-bites-man, while HRC “scandal” stories were inflated. It was only later in the campaign, when executive editors started to realize this could actually happen, that sectors of the press really started to call him out. The tabloids were consistently anti-Clinton while sitting on anti-Trump stories. The tabs aren’t as powerful an influence in the States as they are in the UK, but they can make a difference – ask John Edwards.

The Republicans also added governorships, a critical area where Democrats were already lacking. That lack played a role in last night’s defeat.

@71: Last night makes sense if you view it as a backlash against the presidency of a black man. That was not the only factor and Clinton did have her problems. but it was crucial.

I should not be surprised about the lack of actionable suggestions made in response to the question of “what can we do”. I perhaps shouldn’t be, but I still am.

Friends, I think we must first look to our own preservation. Yes, I do mean the preservation of our very lives. Without that, we will be – and already are – forever fearful. Our fear of death already prevents us from acting. At the immediate moment, it is more important that we begin to preserve whatever is remaining of good within ourselves than to immediately solve the world’s problems. We will surely face the world’s problems soon enough and indeed must face the world’s problems soon, but to be able to have a face simply to face anything whatsoever, we must preserve ourselves.

What is now evident is that fierce new winds with both strange perfumes and rotten odors are blowing like a hurricane all over the globe. No one place can be assumed to be safe. And us friends must now work together with scanty resources and against the greatest difficulties.

I’m sure you’re all rightly asking what that might mean concretely. (Lots of words from me, no suggestions of actions so far!) I believe that we – as friends – must band together as comrades and activists to oppose the new global fascism. Don’t worry about the absolute aptness of the word “fascism”. Whether Orban’s regime is fully like Hirohito’s Japan, or Berlusconi is more like Putin or Mussolini or Franco, or endless other discussions is secondary. Call it “authoritarianism” if you prefer. Call it anything. We – hardheaded as we know we are – know in broad lines what we are up against.

What I call for right now is that everybody here – as fragmented and fractious a community we are – commit to work for the bodily preservation of each other. I’ve been running my mouth, but here’s my first step: if anyone needs a place to stay, I have one (more than one actually). If you’re in trouble, they’re yours. The ancient Greeks said that to turn away the guest or stranger is to offend the gods themselves. I ask if you, my friends, are willing to do the same as I. Even if you don’t have a separate place, you might have an extra bedroom, or a living room couch, or a garage. Your relatives or friends might have a shack in the woods, or a basement. Step up and let people here know that you’re their friend and willing to help – to help where you can, of course. Even if no one needs to take this up, think of how much less fearful many will be just to know that they have eager friends across the world to support them in the coming times.

Secondly, we should experience this tragedy as the tragedy it is. We must wail and mourn. I commit to trying to simply be here for that. Scream, gnash your teeth, pull your hair. Friends, I share your feelings. I will commit to being here to share and encourage this catharsis if need be. We all need to commit to doing the same.

I forgot to mention the Supreme Court. Of all last night’s disasters, the consequences for the Court may well be the worst. Leaving aside the open seat on the Court, which Trump will now fill for the reactionaries, Breyer and Ginsburg now have to try to hold on for four to eight years. They certainly owe it to their country to do so.

‘How come Obama won twice, while Hillary lost? Did voters become more “racist”?’

At this point, that strikes me as an ignorant question. Did the same voters vote in each of those elections? You have no idea. Trump argued that lots of white voters sat out in 2008 and 2012 because McCain and Romney didn’t offer them a message, but that he would turn those voters out because of his message. Perhaps he’s right, and the overt rather than subtle racism was enough to attract them to the polls. The exit poll demographics I’ve seen hint at that.

Uh, no. The Democratic party didn’t demolish itself. It engaged willfully and knowingly in a radical makeover in the 90’s. It wanted to be the political arm-candy of wall st. and global capital. Trump is one of the results. He is equally the result of a completely callow and hateful Republican party that never missed a chance to side with overweening wealth, power, and authority.

BTW: I posted this in Bertram’s thread on Brexit back in June (6/24/16 8.23 pm).

“And so it begins. First Brexit, the election of Trump is likely to be the next big ‘shock.’ Who knows what else might happen in the intervening months. The global managers would do well to start cramming for the test (standardized of course) in political theology that is coming–though I have little doubt they won’t.”

And of course they didn’t. The signs were there and have been perfectly transparent for some time now. Liberals, technocrats, and smart people might want to try on epistemic humility for a change to see how and why Brexit and Trump are deeply connected (besides or in addition to the blindingly shallow and obvious insight that “racists and sexists are racist and sexist”). From this they might begin to reevaluate what concrete coalitions are actually possible, whose interests they actually want to represent, and what problems they actually want to solve.

I’m sure you’re all rightly asking what that might mean concretely. (Lots of words from me, no suggestions of actions so far!) I believe that we – as friends – must band together as comrades and activists to oppose the new global fascism.

A Popular Front too soon for me. I am not interested in a decade of Hell and struggle to bring back the DNC and protect Chelsea Clinton’s 2nd billion. People are already talking about Michele Obama in 2020. Whatever, I am not a Democrat anymore, the party is powerless and irrelevant.

I am gonna spend the next month studying Spain and France in the 30s, the Chinese Republic, along with Japan in the 20s and 30s. Reading a lot of Mao Zedong.

Liberalism had one job since Keynes, or maybe since Napoleon. Keep the goddamn fascists away. After repeated failures they should be totally discredited by now.

Communists had horrors, even genocidal ones. But fascists have no goddamn limits at all. Oh people, God help us.

Hat tip to kidney. I was tuned in to the utter disgust w/HRC in the working class Midwest, but thought Mr.T was just too unhinged. It was close but the disgust was just that strong. Two generations of stagnant median wages will do that.

Now it looks like a massive increase in infrastructure and military spending coupled with massive tax cuts (mostly at the top) will give a huge Keynesian stimulus that was blocked by the repubs for 8 years. Suddenly the debt won’t be a problem. Just like under Reagan and W.

And there’ll be “cost savings” from turning Medicaid, food stamps and other programs for the poor into block grants that will wither away over time. It will be even worse being poor.

“I’m not sure why kidneystones should be thanked, or even congratulated. Before the new comments policy here, his contributions were pretty consistently nasty, personally insulting, and contemptuous of those with whom he disagreed. That his candidate won the election does not seem a sufficient reason to forget his past behavior here.”

This is an excellent example of a feature of liberal culture that is surely related to this loss: liberals have become incapable of detaching evaluation generally from moral evaluation specifically.

To complement Kidneystones on the accuracy of his predictions is not to complement his morals or his rhetorical style or his political endorsements. To even complement him on his ability to understand, even in a sympathetic way, the motivations of Trump supporters is not to complement those supporters or endorse their motives.

We can complement Kidneystones for not having had his head in the sand about the reasons Trump won, even if he has his head in the sand about what the consequences will be. And we’d do better to try to get the rest of the democrats’ heads out of the sand as soon as possible, so we can stop using magical solutions against those oncoming consequences.

It is time for the left to become a reality based community again. And that begins by stopping making excuses for what is at the end of the day a largely self incurred loss.

“So, if this is what’s waiting for us, what can progressives do?… How can we organise nationally and internationally?”

Bernie made a choice, presumably with eyes wide open, to make this run as a Democrat. He has caucused with Democrats for most of his career, he ran for POTUS in the Democratic primary, and he supported the eventual nominee. In return the left got an endless and withering stream of insults.

With the American Democratic party you get marginal improvements to domestic public policy every 20 years or so. Given your questions I assume you don’t think that’s good enough. Well, this cycle the left took it’s best shot at improving the system from within and got smacked down, hard. So, that part of the lesson got learned.

I guess that’s my way of saying that I don’t think the American Democratic party can be the vehicle you are looking for. And since the party duopoly is so deeply entrenched in the system I can’t see much of a way forward in the US. Not saying there isn’t one, just saying I’m having a hard time seeing it.

Maybe the radical centrists in the Dem party have been discredited, and maybe Trump will bungle things so badly that a Bernie-like candidate will have a legitimate chance in four years. That’s not a particularly rational or moral vision but it’s the best I can do at the moment.

Suzanne @75
“@71: Last night makes sense if you view it as a backlash against the presidency of a black man. That was not the only factor and Clinton did have her problems. but it was crucial.”

That is nonsense: the backlash didn’t happen when the black man in question was actually on the ballot, but was there when a white woman was?
Mind you, I am not saying that quite a few racists didn’t voted for Trump: I am saying that “racism!” has no explanation power in explaining why Trump won this time, but Obama won last time (and Bush before, and Clinton Before).

There is a group dynamic when you try to use shaming as a main tool of control.

Democrats failed to watch out for those who got hit hard by globalism–instead retreating into their increasingly expensive cities.

Many of those people, but not all, are racist.

Clinton’s general message was “more of the same” which wasn’t going to help them.

The message of most of the elite media and political class was “more of the same, and if you vote for him you’re a racist”.

Politics is tribal. Instead of trying to make them part of our tribe through inclusion and signs that we were going to improve their lives, we tried to cleave them from the Republican tribe by calling them racist.

That might have worked in concert with actively trying to get them in our tribe, but when you are trying to call 50% of the population racist, the shame factor isn’t likely to be successful.

The election was close. Winning over even a tiny portion of those people would have added up to a win.

So go after those people.

You can choose to be sanctimonious about lumping them in with hardcore racists, or you can try to woo them and win. You probably can’t do both.

As I’ve discussed on Harry’s ‘I (still) believe’ thread, there appears to be a possibility, on the basis of exit polls, that the reason for Trump’s election success is that a small but electorally significant number of men, across a range of groups that are otherwise different on important aspects like ethnicity or income, shifted their vote from Democrats to Republicans in this election.

What should we do about this? Accept the possibility that sexism or bias against women may be a factor, and wait for more detailed and reliable results so that further analysis can be done. Then I guess, if it is confirmed, we have to face it and discuss what can be done about it.

Please, people, don’t launch into an ‘it’s not about sexism, it’s about how awful Hillary Clinton is’ explanation. That simply cannot explain this apparent pattern.

“It is time for the left to become a reality based community again. And that begins by stopping making excuses for what is at the end of the day a largely self incurred loss.”

Agreeing with Yan. Democrats had the correct answer in their hands with Bernie Sanders who was tapping into the exact same discontent that Trump tapped into – except with inclusive and egalitarian solutions rather than divisive and elitist ones.

Unfortunately, either the Clinton machine did in fact co-opt the party machinery to their purpose (of which there is some, albeit sketchy evidence) or the party itself is to be blamed for failing to recognize what was driving voters when the evidence was right in front of them.

Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate were well known – banking on the other guy being worse isn’t a strategy and that’s why the D party, much like Labour in the UK, will now need to spend some time in the wilderness to develop a set of candidates – Governors, state Representatives, House, Senate and President, who are viewed as in-sync with voters.

Back in August I’d have fully embraced the view that Rs were in disarray and that the party might fracture – now its the Ds that are firmly on the ropes with no Federal majorities and few State majorities (and those being fully disfunctional and indebted in more cases than not).

After about a century of democracies (I know China & Russia never were, but they slipped back before they could become one- Gorbachev & Hu Jintao were moving in a different direction. Also Boris Johnson moved on after the fact), it is now a reversion to the mean; Republics. Disappointing, not surprising.

As someone said further up in the comments, Liberals moved republican societies into becoming thriving democracies.

@72 Stephen 11.09.16 at 5:15 pm
“One example of an European Fascist party in recent times…: Sinn Fein under Gerry Adams.”

Nice example. Of the list you give, Trump seems to check only the first item (depending on what you mean by “extreme” and “targeted”):
“Extreme nationalism with ethnic enemies targeted?”
Is it enough to call him Fascist? Maybe…

Recognizing racism is not “shaming.” It is understanding that a group of people who (again) vote for a man whose opening argument to run for leader of the free world was “Mexico is sending us rapists.”

You don’t have to shout this at the racists. This does no mean they are not racists.

bob mcmanus@81: “Communists had horrors, even genocidal ones. But fascists have no goddamn limits at all.”

Not for a moment wanting to support the egregious Trump (as someone said: the only Republican who could have lost to Clinton, who was the only Democrat who could lose to Trump): but going on past form, why do you think that Fascists’, or even Nazi’s limits – if you want to argue Trump is a sort of Nazi – are less restrained than those of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or the Kim dynasty?

“The silent majority apparently don’t like being looked down on by smug, self righteous people from celebrities to politicians to people in the media.”

On this particular issue I have some sympathy with the otherwise deluded Trump voters.

I was travelling on the bus to work this morning (here in the UK) and the two people sat behind me were discussing the US election. They couldn’t believe that someone who ‘had been foreign secretary’ could lose to a man ‘with no political experience’. One then added, and I nearly bashed my own head against the window in frustration, that ‘they were amazed that Trump won when all the celebrities backed Clinton’!

The liberals (plus mainstream Republicans) have helped Trump massively by allowing him to portray himself as an anti-establishment outsider, just as liberals (plus mainstream Conservatives) aided the ‘Brexiteers’ by enabling them to seem like the voice of the people.

Can we dispense with one myth before it becomes entrenched? Trump did not win the working class. Hillary won the $50k income categories. (60-100, 100-150 etc.). What Trump did win, overwhelmingly, of course, was the non-college educated whites. But that’s not the working class, unless you define it that way.

Good news, sort of – it’s business as usual. Reports are out that Trump is considering a Goldman Sachs exec as his Treasury s secretary.

Of course.

The Trump voters are going to get their wish, in one way. Non whites are going to get it in the neck. On economics, though, it will be all for the 0.1%.

> We could tell all the “liberals” who swore for years that “it’s not race its class” to take a good look at an exit poll.

On the contrary, Trump did better then Clinton amongst those with high-income, and probably even more so those with high assets. In all likelihood, most of the difference between more visible groups is explained entirely by those facts. Identity factors exist, but are secondary; some black millionaires identify with poor blacks, some poor whites identify with white millionaires. Both are thinking about the ‘average guy like me’.

Simon Schama tweeted that the economy couldn’t possibly be an explanation for PA or Ohio, as they had 5% unemployment, a considerable drop. This is obvious nonsense; unemployed people vote Democrat. People in precarious jobs dominated by a boss who talks about layoffs if Hilary wins don’t. People on a pension from a struggling company, or with a dwindling retirement portfolio, don’t.

18% of people who voted for Trump considered him unfit to be president. Noone does something they don’t believe in, unless there is something in it for them. Partly this was because they didn’t expect him to win, but mostly it was because their economic interests aligned with his policy; low tax, minimal spending, profitable imperial wars.

The same people who voted for the invasion of Iraq in order to steal the oil, and were rudely surprised when that wasn’t the plan, have voted again. This time for someone who fully intends to do so.

Trump portrayed himself as anti establishment outside by publicly questioning the legitimacy of the first black president. Say what you will but racism still works as a signal that one is a man of (some of) the people.

Igor: I can see why people “don’t like being looked down on by smug, self righteous people from celebrities to politicians to people in the media.” On that point. we’re agreed. I do hope responsible people in the Democratic and (if possible) Labour parties also take the point.

I’m open to argument as to why Trump’s efforts to “portray himself as an anti-establishment outsider” were not genuine. Likewise, why Leave campaigners claiming to be “the voice of the people”, with Labour, Liberal and a large slice of the Tories against them, were not genuine.

They’re all pretty well known -(and easy to google) – from Germany’s Neofaschisten to the Hungarian Jobbik Party – and to ‘qualify’ them as some 10% party with little or no power – is a dangerous understatement as their power currently lies in the hate mongering F…face von Clownstick-like – blaming ‘the others’ – groups of immigrants or ‘other races’ or ‘other countries’ and this blame always comes with threats to eliminate these ‘others’ from society.

The overt nationalism – like ‘to make the own country again’ – or deploying language, implicit and explicit, that tears society apart’ creates an atmosphere not unlike what you might have witnessed during the Racist Birthers campaign.

@95: I know of no voter cohort more hovered over, not to say coddled, this year than Trump voters. Article upon article from journalists quoting their worries, fears, and complaints. Leftists clucking over them, liberals puzzling over how to reach them beyond offering them boring old policy solutions (however limited and inadequate in some respects), conservatives celebrating them as the Real America.

Also, Clinton did what in many systems would be sufficient – that is, she attracted more votes than anybody else. And there are millions yet to be counted and it is likely that many if not most of those will also go to her. Those voters and their concerns exist too.

“Democrats failed to watch out for those who got hit hard by globalism–instead retreating into their increasingly expensive cities.”

@87: Uh, they didn’t “retreat,” they just live there. Although retreating into cities actually looks like a pretty good option right now.

Clinton offered a wide range of policies to help those who are hurting, including a significant rise in the minimum wage. Trump promised them pie in the sky.

@ OP
>We should take seriously the risk of a Trump presidency ending in a large international conflict.

Actually, pretty much the only good thing about Trump’s win is that it doesn’t seem likely to produce a large international conflict *quite* as soon as a HRC victory. An HRC presidency appeared to entail a no-fly zone in Syria or an attack on the Syrian regime, meaning literally an attack on the Russians, and certainly would have included an intensification of the existing confrontation with Russia in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Therefore, it already seemed disquietingly likely to end in a ‘large international conflict’, and more specifically in a direct military confrontation with a nuclear power. Impressively, many talking heads representing the mainstream conventional wisdom have claimed that what is dangerous is, instead, *not antagonising Russia enough*: war is peace and peace is war (of course, this has to do with the fact that in their alternative reality, Russia is the side that initiated the conflicts in Georgia and Ukraine, as well as being about to invade the Baltics and Poland any minute now).

It is a testament to the madness of the course taken by the FP establishment that in this respect, even a profoundly stupid and narcissistic wannabe tough guy exhibiting open disregard for human rights and lives actually appeared a little bit less immediately dangerous than said ‘reasonable’ establishment. Trump is still very scary, of course, and may well do everything wrong that Clinton possibly could have done and then some more (even just letting Mike Pence call the shots in FP would probably be enough to produce that effect). Things being as they are, all my hope for the next four years is that Trump is a conman, but not a madman, and that he is just playing a madman on TV (Godwin calling: ‘You know about whom else they said this?’). I’d like to believe that he wouldn’t have survived in business cheating people for so long if he didn’t possess at least a modicum of common sense and self-preservation instinct, which would help him to avoid completely catastrophic or suicidal moves in his bravado. Or, perhaps, the FP equivalent of his bankruptcies will be that he causes a catastrophic conflict and then scoots off and hides in a ‘yuge’ bunker, while others pay the price of his idiocy. Well, I never claimed that the situation looked good.

>Trump wants jobs for everyone, which is a good thing – although he only mentioned jobs in public infrastructure works, which sounds like predominantly jobs for men. But then we know how much he cares about women’s interests.

If he truly launches such a deeply non-Republican, FDR-style policy, that would be an incredible and very positive precedent that should be welcomed, even if the gender distribution of the jobs leaves something to be desired. I still suspect that whatever he is saying now, in practice, he simply won’t do anything that deviates from Republican orthodoxy, and that would be terrible enough. That’s the path of least resistance, and it will be especially tempting for someone who is, in the end of the day, not really a politician by vocation.

“Trump supporters who think a president Trump wouldn’t really follow through on his pledges regarding trade, NATO or immigration are kidding themselves… I have never heard any public-policy expert make claims like Navarro’s: that trade is the central problem in the world, that trade brings mostly pain to America, and that dramatically lessening trade will bring a renaissance to our economy”

@Tabasco 11.09.16 at 7:46 pm
……………What Trump did win, overwhelmingly, of course, was the non-college educated whites. But that’s not the working class, unless you define it that way………………….

The above comment has been made much too often during the campaign, and getting repeated now, post results, as the major deciding factor in Trump’s election.

The leaders I listed in my previous comment – ALL of them have been elected (but for Xi Jingping, and a comparative educational difference for Abe’s voters where less educated rather than non college educated is the clincher) by the very same demographic. Also, note that it is not an issue of age or gender. Unemployable youth, professionally and economically successful non-college educated elderly voters, &c. In fact, Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, has the richest trading classes as his traditional voters, most over 50, all less educated than Liberal voters.

That is merely descriptive.

On a prescriptive note, the choice is between offering valid acceptable social options to that demographic, Or to work towards reduction of that demographic. I say, we choose the latter. My comment on Civics was on those lines. Large scale communication and education. Go back to soap boxes, street theatre, pamphlets (or their digital equivalents). Get the message out. And keep at it. Only then, can there be a restoration of democracies. The trouble is, do we have the energy to do it all over again? My fear is, we do not. My hope though is that, we have to.

@ Tabasco 97
>Can we dispense with one myth before it becomes entrenched? Trump did not win the working class. Hillary won the $50k income categories. (60-100, 100-150 etc.).

He did not ‘win’ it in the sense of getting more of it than Hillary, but he still won many *more* people from those categories than Romney had won in 2012 and than McCain had won in 2008, and that was probably enough to tip the scales. Again, source: the NYT article ‘How the Presidential Election Took a U-Turn in 2016’.

I blame the Democratic party. They manipulated the primary process to get Hillary nominated. If they’d allowed a normal and competitive primary process, like the Republicans had, we might have selected a more viable candidate, like the Republicans did.

@Tabasco, 97: “Can we dispense with one myth before it becomes entrenched? Trump did not win the working class. Hillary won the $50k income categories. (60-100, 100-150 etc.). What Trump did win, overwhelmingly, of course, was the non-college educated whites. But that’s not the working class, unless you define it that way.”

1. the cohorts are different-sized, and thus not all equally relevant. Winning the >$100m+ cohort doesn’t do you much good (directly). Votes are not income-weighted (yet).
2. The question is not who got the lion’s share of a cohort; the question is how the turn-out is compared to the last time / norm. And there we see huge changes:

@102 nastywoman 11.09.16 at 8:17 pm
@69
‘Would you give some example of those European Fascists?’

“They’re all pretty well known -(and easy to google) – from Germany’s Neofaschisten to the Hungarian Jobbik Party – and to ‘qualify’ them as some 10% party with little or no power …”
Let’s stop here: you gave a list of parties with no effective power, no matter what you claim about “hate mongering F…face von Clownstick-lik” and so on.
Trump instead will have lots of power.
Before you wrote “European ‘Fascists’ are not ALLOWED to imprison or kill political opponents or outlaw ‘Democratic Parties’ – but that doesn’t make them less ‘fascistic’.”

So, again: do you think that he will try to imprison his political opponents (e.g., Hillary), or to outlaw the Democratic Party, or get some private militias?
If not, it’s because you think it’s because he will not be “allowed” to, or because he does not want to (or is not particularly interested in doing it)?
If the latter, why do you claim that he’s Fascist?

“Deploying language, implicit and explicit, that tears society apart”: is it a joke?
Society gets teared apart at every f** election: Hillary herself called half the country “deplorables”. If that’s what you mean as “fascist”…

Some time onlooker and first time commenter so I hope this makes it through.

What I see in the American electorate, if not the world, is a growing incompatible duality between accepting the scientific and technological realities in a post-Enlightenment world and the deeply disturbing reactionary backlash against said realities fueled by dogmatic fideism. It makes me admire people like the Amish; if only all fundamentalists had such conviction.

Secular humanism just got it’s feet taken out. Will it stand back up? I hope so.

“I’m open to argument as to why Trump’s efforts to “portray himself as an anti-establishment outsider” were not genuine. Likewise, why Leave campaigners claiming to be “the voice of the people”, with Labour, Liberal and a large slice of the Tories against them, were not genuine.”

Trump is a multi-millionaire celebrity businessman with an economic programme aimed firmly at extending the riches and privileges of the wealthy. He hardly identifies with a low-paid worker out in some deindustrialised part of Ohio. He just wants their vote.

Similarly, ex-Etonian Johnson, ex-stockbroker Farage and ex-journalist for Murdoch’s ‘quality’ newspaper Gove are not typical candidates for working-class heroes. They too have political and economic ends that are closely aligned with the elite, albeit not the ‘liberal’ elite.

Discontent exists. We have to ask why these charlatans have proved so successful at exploiting it.

James @73. I think (1) is a big one, and I am not optimistic. Remember how long cries of “but China won’t play ball” were able to depay US action?

It is true, that the best progress has been at state and city levels. However federal policy can help/hinder this. Investment tax credit has been crucial for wind/solar (at least project pipelines empties or filled based upon changes). So the buildout rate could take a big hit. Also the federal portion of the EV credit has been a big deal ($7500). So if Trump wishes to do the Koch’s bidding he can slow this as well. Then he had threatened to eliminate fed research money on renewables. I suspect climate modeling and monitoring will also take a big hit.

Now I hope he will do little to none of this, but there may be nothing stoping him if he does.

I don’t think so – as European countries – I mentioned before – seem to have quite a different evaluation what considers ‘Fascism’ – and perhaps it has to do with the fact that (Fascistic) hate Speech in most parts of Europe is a crime and in the US it might be considered ‘Free Speech’.

“I know of no voter cohort more hovered over, not to say coddled, this year than Trump voters. Article upon article from journalists quoting their worries, fears, and complaints. Leftists clucking over them, liberals puzzling over how to reach them beyond offering them boring old policy solutions (however limited and inadequate in some respects)”

I’m not sure I agree with you about even the scale of the talk, but the scale of the response is hinted at in your parenthetical. The ‘boring old policy solutions’ were essentially “we hope you find another job someday” which would be completely inadequate. Since Clinton repeatedly suggested that she was the candidate of “steady as she goes”, they believed her and voted against her.

Clinton simply didn’t enthuse people to the same extent as Obama. And part of that has to have been the trail of incomprehensible-but-scary-sounding baggage to do with “emails”. And part of it has to have been due to misogyny.

Here’s an unpleasant thought: if Mephistopheles offered you the option to fix the result with a time machine, but you had to publicly accept that America wasn’t ready for a woman leader and that the people complaining about emails had a point, would you take the deal?

Clinton also repeatedly stated that she understood there was more work to be done. Obviously she wasn’t going to imply that her old boss’ efforts were inadequate, even though they were and she probably knows that as well as anyone. She generally tried to say the right things and often did. People tuned her out, including many who should know better. Certainly she bears some responsibility for that, but not all of it.

By the way, before I would have considered weakening 1st amendment a quite fascist thing to do.
But nastywoman convinced me otherwise, when she pointed out that most European countries don’t have such protections.
So my thanks to her for opening my eyes.

I asked for POLICIES, not for some “deploying language” and similar stuff.
At this point, it’s quite clear that you don’t have any actual policies that you can point out. so I suppose we can stop debating it.

You welcome – since your comment also pointed to the question of this thread:

What can we do?

Like as in France (for example) the laws against hate speech protect individuals and groups from being defamed or insulted because they belong or do not belong, in fact or in fancy, to an ethnicity, a nation, a race, a religion, a sex, or a sexual orientation, or because they have a handicap. The laws forbid any communication which is intended to incite discrimination against, hatred of, or harm to, anyone because of his belonging or not belonging, in fact or in fancy, to an ethnicity, a nation, a race, a religion, a sex, or a sexual orientation, or because he or she has a handicap.’

If we also would have such good protection – Trump probably would be now in prison – and could discuss there – with his fellow inmates the meaning of being a ‘Fascist’.

“A moral narrative characterizes poor white people as antagonists clinging to the unfair advantages of an earlier time. Resistant to progressive change in order to maintain power over ethnocultural minorities, poor white people are conventionally portrayed as the last vestige of the most forgettable era in twentieth-century social history—what Usherwood (2007) described as the “amoral and apolitical section in society who are neither deserving nor poor. It is a group that is against learning, anti-intellectual, and comprised of individuals who—in the words of one commentator—‘despise browns and blacks’ (especially if they are making something of their lives) and also education, enlightenment and internationalism” (Alibhai-Brown 2007).
Accordingly, poor white people represent an antagonist to other, often equally poor, ethnocultural minority groups—groups that have worked to gain equal footing through efforts like the continuing civil rights movement. More subtly, white elites, whose antecedents may have once supported policies of exclusion and rose to elite status through prejudiced systems of education and promotion, vilify poor whites (see Jones 2011; Wray 2006). In the drive to counterbalance historical discrimination, both white elites and minority groups often distance themselves from poor white people to account for their success in these systems—systems that working class white people had a lesser hand in building.
Specifically, white members of the “underclass” have been singled out as behaviorally or morally inferior. In the United Kingdom, they are associated with “backwardness” and stereotypes condemning “unclean” and “lazy benefit-hunting mother[s] of several children” (Jones 2011; Wray 2006), even while white people are also able to claim a rhetorical high ground as their country’s “heart and soul”—the people that historically spilled blood and perspired for a continuing national existence.”

‘Revolt on the Right”, James Goodwin (2014)

“UKIP’s revolt matters, firstly, because it has given a voice to groups in British society who have been written out of political debate, and turned against traditional mainstream politics. Over recent decades, deep social and economic changes have hit particular groups within British society very hard: older, less skilled and less well educated working-class voters. These are the groups we describe as the ‘left behind’ in modern Britain, who could once rely on the strength of their numbers to ensure a voice in each of the mainstream parties. Yet as Britain has been transformed, the relentless growth of the highly educated middle classes has changed the strategic calculus.

Both Labour and the Conservatives now regard winning support from middle-class swing voters as more important than appealing to these struggling left behind voters. Before the emergence of UKIP, their response to being ignored was to turn their backs on politics, staying home en masse on election day and developing a sour, anti-establishment outlook. The political impact of this was limited – party strategists were concerned, but not threatened, by falling turnout and growing hostility to politicians. The emergence of UKIP changes the game – the left behind now have a potent voice articulating their concerns, and mainstream parties face a real and effective competitor who have mobilised sections of British society they neglected for years. .”

The evidence coming out now is starting to point towards coherent theories of ‘economic anxiety’ as *a* cause of what is happening. There are numerous people in the media who should lose their jobs immediately, for becoming little more than propagandists.
(Also, kidneystones rhetoric and one man Trump show over the past few months is evidence for why less ideological diversity here would be a negative)

Yes, I know that the anti-democratic Electoral College is decisive. And (in relation to some comments above) I know there are all sorts of ways of carving up US citizens into fragmentary categories some of which an election campaign simultaneously seeks to bring together for a brief moment in order to try to win an election. But there are some numbers (taken from several NYTs) that are pretty interesting about this election:

It does look as if Trump and his party are only a change party if you mean changing towards the policies of the 1920s. Refusing to join the League of Nations, tariffs to screw up the world economy by disrupting international trade and the monetary system, unreasonable demands for debt repayments from europe, deranging its baking system, huge tax cuts for the wealthy and plenty of lynching for the darkies to keep in their place. Severe reductions in immigration based on Race. Plus rampant corruption by Cabinet members.

Reagan did use threats of tariffs to get the Japanese to restrain auto imports to the USA in a “voluntary agreement.” Which proved in the end a temporary ploy for the election cycle eventually abandoned. Who can tell which bits of the mixture will be junked when convenient or which will be permanent. One suspects based on history only the bits that help the wealthy will be retained when the rest is thrown overboard. The USA could rebuild its industry with huge import tariffs and subsidies; and that would have a Fascist industrial policy characteristic of central planning. So that would qualify as an arrangement like that set up by Hitler in Europe or Japan during its aggression in Asia. Liberal reform and trade were supposed to save us from the kind of violent conflict that this kind of policy tends to produce. The logic of the zero sum leads to war as the ultimate kind of competition.

The majority of the people who voted for Trump are people who voted Republican last time and will vote Republican again next time (not all, but the majority, and by a wide margin).

I can’t think of one good reason why, in allocating limited time, energy, and resources, you would give priority to conversations with Trump voters over conversations with people who voted for Obama but did not vote at all this time. There were/are millions of them.

With President-elect Trump’s victory last night, the last hopes of the Obama administration passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the lame duck session of Congress have evaporated. The passage of the TPP through Congress was dependent upon support from members of the Republican majority, and there is no realistic prospect that they will now pass the deal given their elected President’s firmly expressed opposition to it. Even if they did so, the new President would presumably veto the pact’s implementing legislation.

Weimar America just tipped over into Reichstag America.
What can we do?
Leave.
Get the hell out before the purges and disappearances start.
A sensible person has to know when history is against you. The optimists who stayed in Germany after 1935 or Russia after 1917 did not come to a good end.
Reagan 1980 -> George W. Bush 2000 -> Donald Trump 2016 is not a progression that says “progressives are on the right side of history” and “America is a country that values the rule of law.” It’s all very well to talk about preserving our ideals, but when you’re dead in a ditch courtesy of a death squad, your ideals don’t matter any more.

I was hoping that the new moderation policy would, ahem, get rid of people who are interested in Just Asking Questions about why people might liken Trump’s support to fascism.

Is CT—its front-page posters—planning on taking an official line on Trump and his supporters? Not to put too fine a point on it: is defending Trump going to be acceptable in the comments of this blog? Is it possible for a blog to be devoted to fostering discussion between liberals and leftists but also allow apologies for fascism?

I want to second Alesis, Val et al above pointing out that Trump did not win the working class. Exit polls gave the below median income voters to Clinton. Trump won old people and white men. This was a victory for racism and sexism pure and simple. It also appears he got a surprising number of Latino and African American voters, possibly also men, though we don’t know for sure yet.

People voted on class and economic interests: older, wealthier (primarily white) people with investments voted for the representative of the investor and wealthy class, while younger, poorer and non-white people voted for the party of the working class and the vulnerable.

But as America ages, the number of people in the investor/wealthy class – also the people freest to vote on a Tuesday – is growing, and the Dems have to deal with this.

Also kidneystones was wrong. Clinton won the popular vote, and Trump won the presidency by winning votes in a narrow margin in a few states, taking advantage of a broken electoral system that was developed to favour rich white southern men. I don’t want to trawl back through all the bile and viciousness in kidneystones’ past comments, but I don’t remember him ever mentioning the electoral college.

This is a nasty outcome for America, and Americans are really going to regret this in short order. But now there can be no excuses from anyone for how America’s problems are the Democrats’ fault – it’s a Republican country from top to bottom, and they own every problem that is coming to them.

I talked to an elated Trump voter today. She had little to say about Trump, other than “Give him a chance.” No, her elation was at the defeat of Hillary, and the attendant possibility that opened up to get rid of the corruption in Washington. Specifically, she adduced the Clinton Foundation, with its $600,000 salary to Chelsea Clinton, and Hillary’s receipt of cash from Saudi Arabia and Morocco, as well as complaining about Benghazi and something that I took to be death panels.

In other words, this woman deeply, deeply loathed Clinton for reasons that are complete bullsh*t. (Chelsea Clinton’s salary is zero.) All the talk about Clinton being a “weak candidate” has not mentioned the largely successful 25 year effort by Republicans and their media arm to convince the public of lies about her (abetted to some extent by the mainstream media). It’s also noteworthy how eagerly a lot of the left has embraced this story, with Bernistas of my acquaintance eagerly reposting on Facebook mysteriously appearing untrue stories. (The NYT had a story last year about an active effort by Republicans to plant false stories about HRC on Facebook. The story sank like a stone.) And sure enough, someone upthread here made some remark about Chelsea’s future billions.

So my suggestion is to think hard about how to deal with the fact that (as in Russia and China) there is a systematic and successful disinformation campaign going on in the US. And, to start with, for the left itself to stop being so f***ing gullible.

This woman, btw, owns a couple of homes, is not college-educated, and is white. We didn’t get into her racial views, but she did add some comment about Section 8 housing and what a ripoff it is.

“So, if this is what’s waiting for us, what can progressives do? How can we get into a conversation with those who voted for Trump?”

Does no one here know anyone who voted for Trump? If true, please get out of your bubble! I live in red NC. If you believe that just yahoos and rednecks voted from Trump, that is a false narrative. College-educated, relatively wealthy people also voted for Trump. Women voted for Trump (they’re all over my FB page! Quite astonishing what they believe about Clinton!) I had a professor gloat about Trump’s victory today.

There are certainly racists who voted for Trump, but some also voted against Clinton (‘the establishment.’) Watch Trump’s “Argument for America” video – extremely effective propaganda, though I’ll bet most in middle America will be shocked to learn the pundits think it’s about anti-semitism.

If you are truly progressive, become active in the Democratic Party. “Act local; think global.”

A key reason (as Thomas Frank notes) for Trump’s victory is the Democratic Party’s decision to abandon the middle and working classes, right around the time HRC’s husband was president. HRC’s refusal to release GS transcripts indicates she was adept at shifting her message depending on the audience – the real question: why did she need to hide the GS message from the public? MANY Trump voters likely were screwed by the 2008 crash (and noticed that bankers got bonused.) And of course, Obama waded into health care instead of focusing on truly reforming the corrupt banking system.

A belated response to Snowman (@17 and @42): Why not communism? Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Benin, Bulgaria, Cambodia, China, Congo-Brazzaville, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, East Germany Hungary, Laos, North Korea, Mongolia, Mozambique, Poland, Romania, Somalia, USSR, Venezuela, Vietnam, South Yemen, and Yugoslavia, that’s why. And 100 million dead bodies, that’s why. And communism is particularly dangerous to people with minority opinions, such as the people on this site, sending them to Siberia or to the firing squad, that’s why.

6 million fewer Democratic voters than 2012. The two stories are: where did the Democratic voters go? and why did so many poor and working class voters shift to vote Republican? Obvious plausible answers: Hillary and her campaign did not inspire or mobilize people, voter suppression, and Trump’s economic populism.

In addition, Clinton did worse than Obama with white and poorer people but also with blacks (-6%), Latinos (-6%), and young voters (-6%). It’s hard to square the data with the simple “it’s racism, stupid” narrative.

Why should that be the question? What I see in the figures reported is that a majority of those voters who are on annual incomes below $50,000 voted for Clinton, that if voters on annual incomes below $50,000 had decided the result Clinton would have won, that Trump owes his victory to voters on annual incomes above $50,000. How is that not important?

I’m hearing that more people voted for Hillary Clinton to be president than voted for Donald Trump. More Americans wanted her to be president than him. That’s a considerable accomplishment.

And yet we’re confronted with a convincing electoral college victory for Donald Trump [the count that matters under our constitution] and his rightful claim to the presidency, however many more Americans wanted Hillary to be in charge.

Technically speaking, the Democrats got the wrong kind of majority this time. They crafted exactly that majority in hopes it would result in the one that counts, which was not to be. But they do now represent a majority, which is a start.

I’ve been very ‘liberal’ in moderating, but please remember our comments policy on top of the page. There is no point in going back and forth endlessly between two or a few commenters if you disagree. And although we do respect anonymity of commenters, we ask you to not use fake email addresses.

And just to be clear: I will delete snarky or ad-hominem posts (whether against the OP, the blog in general, or other commenters). We know now that a large percentage of American voters don’t give a damn if someone is excessively rude or insulting, but I do. I am sure I will make mistakes in moderation, but if your post doesn’t appear, think again (and rewrite).

As to snowman’s @135 question: the Timberites don’t have any “official” collective standpoints on anything, except on issues related to the blog, and one can deduce some collective value commitments from our comments policy, both substantive and how we want to hold conversations here. I’m not saying that we will never change this, but so far the agreement is that we write blogposts in our own name and every Timberite takes responsibility for what they write. That said, you can judge for yourself the likelihood that anyone of us is supporting Trump. Commenters can defend Trump’s views or policies as long as they do not conflict with our comments policy. E.g. no defense of racism or sexism here; there are other places on the internet where people can do this, if they feel a need to do so. But I can imagine having a sensible discussion about Trumps economic policies, or his international diplomacy efforts, once we get there.

The 6 million votes that Clinton is down on Obama will come down as the California vote is finalised, but, really, so what?

As for the fact that Clinton got more votes than Trump, but lost the electoral college – again, so what? Are we supposed to support majoritarianism now because it is convenient? Clinton lost because she could not convince Obama voters in PA, OH, MI and WI, the so-called blue wall, to vote for her. Trump won counties in these states that Obama won by 20 points.

It has been grimly amusing these past 24 hours to hear Clinton supporting commentators say “we always had our doubts about her as a candidate” when up until Monday night they were effusive about what a superb campaign she had run. No one should ever pay any attention to these fraudsters again.

That Clinton won a majority of lower income voters isnt exactly uplifting. In terms of normal left/right politics, Clintons victory margin was far far to low in that category.
If US politics were only a tiny little more European, if the classical division line rich poor played any role, a Clinton victory would have been a no brainer.

@148
Perhaps we should have started with reposting Michael Moore’s five-point plan here too – starting with the introspection of his point 4

‘Everyone must stop saying they are “stunned” and “shocked.” What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all “You’re fired!” Trump’s victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that.’

Pete @ 119
>Clinton simply didn’t enthuse people to the same extent as Obama. And part of that has to have been the trail of incomprehensible-but-scary-sounding baggage to do with “emails”. And part of it has to have been due to misogyny.

And part of that ‘has to have been’ (because I say so) other problems that she had, such as, say, the impression that she is a shifty representative of the elite and the status quo who isn’t really committed to anything other than her own advancement. But yeah, even assuming that her failure was entirely due to misogyny, was this really worth irreversibly ruining the climate of the planet (@ 122)? I can see how an almost-victory by Sanders could have done some good by demonstrating the popularity of his views and shifting the overton window, forcing other politicians and even the winner to take note. Not so much in HRC’s case.

At this point, I might be missing something, but the only remaining hope that I can imagine is for Trump’s actions to be countered by powerful and well-publicised protests to try to save what can be saved as regards healthcare (‘Hands off my health insurance’ can cut both ways), inter-community relations and, above all (!), climate change. BTW, I think that such protests will be less likely to be efficient if they are mixed with automatic partisan attacks against whatever (if any) economic populist and dovish policies Trump might try to realise in practice.

snowman @ 135
You’re calling for communism (17, 42) *and* censorship of ideas (135) – a combination which doesn’t really have a very good historical track record, BTW – and you seem to be strangely confident that proponents of communism wouldn’t be among the first ones against whom this censorship would be applied. Personally, I’m all for public ownership of the means of production (though not for censorship), but you would really need to spell out your suggestion that white supremacy and patriarchy cannot be eliminated within capitalism. It’s certainly not the most obvious and indisputable argument against it.

I’m waffling on how much to blame the Clintons. I remember the media treatment and the Russian hacking, and then I remember that no one could dare point out the name “Clinton” was even more toxic in this country than “Obama,” and yet she ran anyway. And then I remember GOP governors and Voter ID measures and the effect of the Shelby Co, along with FBI ratf*cking shenanigans. And then I remember the lack of marketing, narrative, and messaging by the Clinton campaign, as if running a “historic” campaign with victory laps in GA and AZ was all you had to do to win.

So there’s hubris and political malpractice tangled up with strong ideological and GOP-manufactured headwinds, along with the historical inertia of a two term President.

The bright spot is the Clintons and their “gang” go away for a long time, perhaps forever. Where, I don’t know, but I’m thinking Trump will keep them free as convenient boogeymen to reference.

That Clinton won a majority of lower income voters isnt exactly uplifting. In terms of normal left/right politics, Clintons victory margin was far far to low in that category.

Yes, can we think of any reason why this might be? Any ideological position that Trump was presenting that might have diluted support for the candidate who was presenting the policies that were best for this group…?

Err, because that turned out to be the difference between a (past) victory and a (present) defeat? And because it is indicative of what is *special* (as opposed to predictable) about this election?

Why should the most recent prior election result be treated as a default outcome requiring no explanation, whereas what has to be explained about the current election result is how it deviates from that baseline? By that logic, whatever the result is in 2020 it will be compared to 2016 as the baseline, and people will be looking for an explanation of how it deviates from that, while this year’s result will have become, in retrospect, a default that requires no explanation.

@144 Raven Onthill
manta@69: the fascist policies that Trump has embraced so far are mass deportations and tracking of members of a religious group.

Good examples.
However how do they differ from the actual existing policies in Germany and France? (correct me if I am mistaken, but illegal immigration there is a felony, and you may end in prison for it).

Snowman@135: since I am one of the people that you want to be banned, I think I should rebut your point with an example.

Now, immigration policies are much more lax in USA than in Europe.
I think that the USA model is better than the European one, and that Trump ideas on immigration are bad and racist.
However, his ideas are “make the USA policies on immigration a bit more similar to the European ones”: definitely not Fascist.

“Whites voted less for Trump than for Romney, while both blacks and Latinos voted more for Trump. There’s nothing here that suggests Trump appealed to white backlash in any special way. Quite the opposite.”

@71 Politeness and patience would have brought people around. I very doubt that.

@66 I apologize.

@138 The woman is wrong. Chelsea Clinton was not paid $600 k from the Clinton Foundation. Chelsea Clinton was paid $600 k per year from 2011 by NBC for ‘work’ as a special correspondent, whilst also pocketing $300 k per year plus stock options as a ‘board member’ of IAC. Chelsea’s speaking fees were a mere $65 k per.

The NYT offers a more severe critique of the IAC board deal readable by clicking through the links. There will be those who see nothing improper about a fifth-estate firm paying a 31 year-old graduate student $600 k, or awarding her a board seat and stock options at $ 300k. Others may disagree, and perhaps with some good reason.

The defeat of the democratic candidate by a rodeo clown is a slap in the face. Contra Manta @71 I do not believe that anything less than a slap in the face of this order would be enough to jar the successful and well-fed out of their state of complacency and indifference to the plight of both the blacks and whites left behind by 8 years of Democratic rule, and far longer when we’re talking about urban African-Americans.

As noted, I believe the Republican candidate to be far and away the more sober, safer choice both on domestic and foreign policy. Now we’ll find out.

Barack Obama continued Bush-era torture, only slightly differently. Obama restricted torture to Appendix M of the CIA’s interrogation manual — that’s the manual that the CIA created by studying the Chinese communist’s Mao-era thought reform torture methods. Appendix M prohibits cutting and beating in favor of sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, cold, noise assault, and other methods like the water drip method. These forms of torture leave no marks but drive people insane or destroy their minds as surely as the standard three weeks of non-stop beatings favored in Lubyanka.

Let’s not forget that the American president who began our current ride on the torture carousel was Bill Clinton, who initiated “extraordinary rendition” (AKA fly prisoners to third world countries in CIA chartered Lear jets and let third world dictators torture the victims for us).

The problem with the smug top-4% narrative of the Democratic elite’s professional class that “It’s all about racism!” is that many of the counties in red states that went heavily for Trump in this election went even more heavily for Bernie Sanders. A lot of states that voted for Trump in this election voted for Obama in the last election.

What, did those Rust Belt states suddenly decide to not become racist when Obama ran, and then became racist again when Trump ran? How does that work? “A black guy is running for president, so I’m going to stop being a racist and vote for him. Oh, wait, now a white guy is running for president, so I’m going to become a racist again.” Does that make sense?

No, the more credible explanation is: 1) Barack Obama very eloquently promised Hope and Change in 2008 and 2012. 2) Barack Obama systematically broke his promises of hope and change.

3) Hillary Clinton promised to continue Obama’s policies. 4) Working people who had voted for Obama in the hope that he truly would change things lost patience and got sick of Democrats who (in the words of one millenial) “promise everything and change nothing.”

Populism is the real explanation for Trump’s victory. Trump is insane and a sociopath, but he talked about stopping the globalization that’s destroying the American middle class and ending our crazy endless unwinnable foreign wars. By contrast, Hillary Clinton gave $225,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs hedge fund traders in which she said the “banker-bashing so popular within both parties was unproductive and indeed foolish.”

Meanwhile Bill Clinton dismissed the American population’s rage at the bankers who crashed the world economy with the comment: `”You could take Lloyd Blankfein in an alley and slit his throat, and it would satisfy them for about two days,” Clinton said. “Then the blood lust would rise again.”‘

Did I mention that Hillary’s daughter Chelsea is married to former Goldman Sachs hedge fund manager Mark Mezvinsky? They recently bought a pre-WW I ten million dollar townhouse overlooking Madison Square Park. So much for Chelsea’s “zero dollar salary.” I don’t know a lot of people with a salary of zero dollars who can afford to buy 10.5 million dollar apartments in the upper West Side of New York. Do you?

Hillary has wooed defense contractors with the love that dare not speak its name (the love of foreign intervention, AKA burning brown babies by the bushel-load) and she has promised lots more endless unwinnable wars around the globe, disguised as the sound-bite “America needs a more assertive foreign policy.”

`“It is clear that she is behind the use of force in anything that has gone on in this cabinet. She is a Democratic hawk and that is her track record. That’s the flag she’s planted,” said Gordon Adams, a national security budget expert who was an associate director in President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget.

`Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who has spent her post-service days protesting the war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, is more blunt. “Interventionism is a business and it has a constituency and she is tapping into it,” she tells TAC. “She is for the military industrial complex, and she is for the neoconservatives.”’

By way of contrast, here’s Donald Trump giving a speech on foreign policy:

“Unfortunately, after the Cold War, our foreign policy veered badly off course. We failed to develop a new vision for a new time. In fact, as time went on, our foreign policy began to make less and less sense. Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, and this led to one foreign policy disaster after another. We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama’s line in the sand in Syria. Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos, and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper.

“It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western Democracy. We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism; thousands of American lives, and many trillions of dollars, were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill the void, much to their unjust enrichment. Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster. No vision, no purpose, no direction, no strategy.”

Do I believe that Trump meant any of that? Of course not. Did Trump change his foreign policy stance five minutes after he gave that speech? Probably. Is the rest of that Trump foreign policy speech crazy and counterfactual? Obviously — especially the part where Trump claims that America’s military is underfunded (!)

But the point here is that Trump actually at least talked about these screwups. He talked about America’s mad wars around the globe. He talked about how American leaders couldn’t stop getting into endless unwinnable foreign quagmires after the Cold War ended. Every ordinary American knows this stuff. But no one in Washington was talking about it — except Trump. Hillary, who voted for the Iraq war of 2003 and tried to convince president Obama to bomb Iran rather than negotiate, certainly never wanted to mention any of these inconvenient problems. And our beloved president Obama’s response was “America is already great.” Torture? Endless wars? Collapsing middle class? Burgeoning poverty? Skyrocketing child malnutrition? Bankers asset-stripping the economy? No problem, America is already great. Enjoy!

Sanders and Trump were the only candidates who talked about American corporations shipping jobs overseas. Sanders and Trump were the only candidates who talked about bankers looting the population and crashing the world economy and paying themselves bonuses out of the publicly-funded bailout money. Sanders and Trump were the only candidates who talked about how globalization is destroying the U.S. middle class.

The professionals with advanced degrees who make $80,000 a year or more (the top 4% of the American population) are the ones who control the Democratic party today. And they made sure Sanders never got the nomination. These self-styled Big Brains have decided to treat ordinary working folks and peons who have a mere bachelor’s degree and no professional credential (Ma, PhD, M.D., LLD, JD) the same way Jim Crow Southerners used to treat black people. Everyone without an advanced degree is now treated by the leaders of the Democratic party as one of “those people,” ungrateful curs who have the unbelievable gall to criticize their betters. “Those people” have the insufferable temerity to question the wiser and smarter and far more wealthy doyens of the Democratic party, the masterminds with professional credentials, the geniuses who assure them that the TPP is spiffy and globalization is absolutely marvy-doo and global wage arbitrage is just dreamy.

To the professional class top-4% who run the Democratic party, working people and scum with a mere bachelor’s degree are inferior creatures, not ready for self-governance. “Those people” must be guided by a superior breed, the elites with advanced degrees, those wise enough to have gotten things right by invading Iraq. And deregulating the banks. And making sure Bernie Sanders never got the Democratic nomination. And writing those marvelous zero-hours work contracts that let employers force employees to call in every morning to see if they get a shift that day.

“Those people” without advanced degrees need careful management, since they have no impulse control, they’re filthy and smelly, they’re really animals who can’t help drinking and carousing and breeding. “Those people” never had the discipline to get a masters or an M.D., so they need a firm hand, and the strict guidance of the All-Powerful Market to keep them in check. Sound familiar? Sort of like, oh, say, Deep South slaveowners talking about their slaves circa 1840?

Populism. That’s the reason why Trump won. He’s a pathological liar and a malignant narcissist and a sociopath, but he’s the only one of the two presidential candidates who sounded any genuinely populist notes during the campaign. When Hillary was asked if she wanted to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, she said “no.” When Hillary was asked about foreign wars, she lapsed into the old “indispensable nation” crap. When Hillary was asked about single-payer health care she called it “something that will never, ever happen.”

@Manta: you are wrong. Given that the European Court of Justice has ruled that illegal immigration cannot be sufficient ground for a prison sentence, as of today (although who knows what will happen), it’s not even possible to do what you say they are doing. And neither Germany nor France, nor any other EU country, tracks members of a religious group (as we’re talking about Muslims, that would entail tracking between 5 and 10% of the population living in France or Germany, vs. 1-2% in the US).
Illegal immigration is, well, illegal. Everywhere. There is no country, AFAIK, that says that all immigration is legal. The US already has a heavily militarized border fence and the Obama administration has deported record numbers of illegal immigrants. Trump is saying that it is nowhere enough. Do you think he’ll come in and say, well, folks, we’re already doing everything we can given the personel, economic, human and legal constraints we have?
The police and security have engaged in massive surveillance programs aimed at tracking any potentially dangerous “member of a religious group”, including the surveillance of mosques, web sites, flagging of anyone with a suspicious travel history. Is Trump going to say that well, we’re doing everything we can, let’s do more of the same?
Precisely on those topics, the question is how far you can still go without breaking basic legal constraints essential to a liberal, democratic society. And we’ve already gone very far in the past decade.

Manta http://crookedtimber.org/2016/11/09/what-can-we-do/#comment-697775
Germany requires all residents to register and have documentation. Illegal residents can be deported (although where they are sent to can be a problem and all have the right to apply for political asylum or asylum as refugees from wars). The problem is that US does not have this registration or documentation requirement and so there is no way of ensuring that deportees are in fact illegal immigrants so the possibility for misuse is very large. Also the US does not prosecute employers for employing illegal immigrants whereas in Germany it is illegal. In my view this lack of consistency – if you like bias – in the law is the biggest problem.

– as our back and fourth about Trump as a ‘Fascist’ (or not) – has proven not to be very ‘constructive’ – what’s about finally getting to the most constructive (communistic?) plan of F..face von Clownstick:

‘Getting manufacturing back – and the jobs for Americas workers – and (how socialistic?) his promise to have a talk with some CEO’s and companies – if they would try to outsource their jobs to low cost countries.
-(could that be considered happily ‘a way of organizing a society in which government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people?)

Concerning ‘what can we do’ – we – like Elizabeth Warren – could support such ‘revolutionary’ efforts wholeheartedly – and even on top of it – asking for an extensive job creating program too – in the Trump spirit of ‘Americas Workers Unite’?
-(Where did we hear something similar before?)

– Trump performed about the same among white voters as Romney (+1%)*
– Clinton performed about the same among women as did Obama 2012 (+2%)*
– Clinton performed worse among black voters than did Obama 2012 (-7%)
– Clinton performed worse among Latino voters than did Obama 2012 (-6)

* These differences are within the margin of error of the underlying polls

What I not finding so far are detailed turnout numbers. I’ve seen claims that more rural white voters turned out, and perhaps more white voters overall; and it is likely that fewer black voters turned out than in 2008 and 20012 (because Obama wasn’t on the ballot). But I haven’t seen any actual data on those points. Anyone?

About expulsions, however, I don’t see where we disagree: what Raven called “mass deportation” is “expelling illegal immigrants”: is that “Fascist”? It’s sure to ruin the life of many people, but, as you said: “legal immigration is, well, illegal. Everywhere. There is no country, AFAIK, that says that all immigration is legal.”
In particular, it’s what Obama is also doing (albeit with much more emphasis on just-arrived immigrants, not on people who entered USA long time ago)

Yes, Clinton is about as unconvincing a left candidate as one can get and yes Trumps anti free trade anti- immigration stance does have some appeal to poorer people. Still, he is also anti Obama care and pro lowering taxes for rich people. That would be a little more important, no? Its not like holders of traditional industrial jobs are a significant part of the poor population, much less the below average income population. When Trump described his vision of an America where even the ships are US built, he could have won over no more than a couple of hundred people left working in classical civil ship construction…..

I would like to ask people to stop debating here whether Trump is a fascist or not – enough has been said and at some point it becomes a semantic discussion.
Also, something that gave rise to revising our comments policies is going on again – the tone of comments is getting nastier with insults at people rather than arguments. I’m deleting such comments – happy to publish if people leave out the personal insults.

“The problem with the smug top-4% narrative of the Democratic elite’s professional class that “It’s all about racism!” is that many of the counties in red states that went heavily for Trump in this election went even more heavily for Bernie Sanders.”

This is a particularly poor argument, akin to saying “…since Obama won the 2008 Idaho Democratic Caucus by 62 points over Clinton, he had a better chance to win the general election in Idaho.”

Also, too: People vote, not states. If you’re looking at state-level outcomes, you’re not going to learn anything about the motivation of voters. The interesting questions are 1) who voted and who did not, 2) how did they vote, 3) why do they say they voted that way, and 4) what can we infer about their motives?

For me, the most likely explanation is that people FIRST decided to vote for candidate X, and THEN they decided why they were voting for X (see for instance the “effect of international trade” question).

1) Tom Ferguson at Real News Network post at Naked Capitalism says (and said in 2014) that the Democratic coalition of Wall Street (Silicon Valley) + Identity Politics is imploding, because it can’t deliver populist goodies without losing part of it’s core base.
Noted no for that, but for my equation of Neoliberalism (or Post-Capitalism) = Wall Street + Identity Politics generated by the dematerialization of Capital. CDO’s are nothing but words on paper or bytes in the stream; and identity politics has much less to do with the Body than the culture and language. Trumpists were interpellated as White by the Democrats and became ideological. Capital is Language.

2) Consider the above an intro to

Lauren Berlant at the New Inquiry “Trump or Political Emotions” which I think is smart. Just a phrase cloud that stood out for me. All following from Berlant, except parenthetical

It is a scene where structural antagonisms — genuinely conflicting interests — are described in rhetoric that intensifies fantasy.

People would like to feel free. They would like the world to have a generous cushion for all their aggression and inclination. They would like there to be a general plane of okayness governing social relations

( Safe Space defined as the site where being nasty to those not inside is admired and approved. We all have them, we all want them, we create our communities and identities for this purpose.)

“Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism’s unfairness. Then what? Then Trump’s response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad. Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet — and this is key — the noise in his message increases the apparent value of what’s clear about it. The ways he’s right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the ways he’s blabbing.”

(Wonderful, and a comprehension of New Media I rarely see. Cybernetics? Does noise increase the value of signal? The grammatically correct tight argument crowd will not get this. A problem I have with CT’s new policy)

“You watch him calculating, yet not seeming to care about the consequences of what he says, and you listen to his supporters enjoying the feel of his freedom. “

(If “civil speech” is socially approved signal, then noise = freedom and feeling. Every two year old and teenage guitarist understands)

“But Trump’s people don’t use suffering as a metric of virtue. They want fairness of a sort, but mainly they seek freedom from shame. Civil rights and feminism aren’t just about the law after all, they are about manners, and emotions too: those “interest groups” get right in there and reject what feels like people’s spontaneous, ingrained responses. People get shamed, or lose their jobs, for example, when they’re just having a little fun making fun. Anti-PC means “I feel unfree.”

The OP asks what we can do. As a Canadian, I don’t think I can do much. As our former prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau remarked, living next to the US is much like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly the elephant, “one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

But though I was surprised by the election result, now I wonder why. The US has the best health care in the world. It has the best universities. It also has the worst education in some parts of itself, and third-world health conditions. The gap between the worst-off and the best-off has become huge.

When the housing crisis happened, the banks and auto-makers were bailed out. That enraged me, and I wasn’t directly affected. How much more enraging was it for people who lost their homes? For how long can the enormous gap between the haves and have-nots widen without a rebellion by the have-nots? I guess we have just found out.

– but as ‘the market’ is getting to new heights by the minute and there are serious gamblers who already betting on a yuuge lift for the US economy – and our memory – anyhow – isn’t good – and ‘the word’ right now is so much about the ‘Great American Way’ of ‘Forward Positive Thinking’ – the question ‘What can we do’ – soon will turn into:
‘Do –
About what?-

-(at least California legalized Surfing – and staying entirely on the beach for the next four years we won’t even remember in 2020 that 2016 happened…)

Layman, it doesn’t matter how many times you say this. The rhetoric of trump appealing to white working class voters (there are no black ones!) has set in, and all political debate has to revolve around this convenient “fact”.

mclaren @162Barack Obama continued Bush-era torture, only slightly differently. Obama restricted torture to Appendix M of the CIA’s interrogation manual — that’s the manual that the CIA created by studying the Chinese communist’s Mao-era thought reform torture methods. Appendix M prohibits cutting and beating in favor of sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, cold, noise assault, and other methods like the water drip method. These forms of torture leave no marks but drive people insane or destroy their minds as surely as the standard three weeks of non-stop beatings favored in Lubyanka.

The Guardian column linked by mclaren in support of this does not discuss whether or to what extent the Appendix M techniques were actually used after the ’09 exec order. Nor does mclaren say whether the water-drip method is the same as waterboarding, which I thought had been specifically prohibited by the exec order.

Also, mclaren (conveniently) omits to note that Obama substantially reduced the number of detainees at Guantanamo and tried to close the facility altogether, but Congress blocked that.

Glancing through the rest of mclaren’s comment I see the passage about people w bachelor’s degrees but not advanced degrees being treated as “peons” and looked down on by the ‘Dem elite’. Nonsense. Plenty of members of that elite don’t have advanced degrees, and conversely there’s a non-trivial number of people w advanced degrees who are underemployed or unemployed and not members of any economic elite.

Layman, perhaps. I know everyone here is very concerned to see what group voted for which candidate (of the 50 % of eligible voters who turned out). But it seems to me that such a terribly unequal society is unstable. Perhaps I worded it simplistically (well, I did) but I think when a society becomes so unjustly unequal that maybe it isn’t helpful to point fingers. Maybe the inequality itself is key.

Except it is not a rebellion of the have-nots. Clinton won among the have-nots.

Most of them didn’t of them didn’t vote. Of those that did, given the choice between ‘America is Already Great’ and ‘I’m Mad as Hell’ a significant number (ie. 16% of those earning under $30000 p.a.) switched allegiance to the latter. That wasn’t the core of Trump’s vote but it was a crucial part of it.

Of course it would have been better if our side had won. Please don’t mistake my remarks for mindless contrarianism, or for some sort of claim that it’s nice that the contradictions are about to be heightened.

I think this is the least disheartening loss the Ds have had in my memory, which goes back to the ’68 election. Yes, this time the other side was more open about being for White Power, that this election was about keeping white people in power. That’s my point, this time they felt they had to be more open about it. This is an opportunity, not a disaster. This is progress.

The disaster has been that the Rs won in ’68 by taking over the segregationist franchise from the Ds, and our side’s response since then has been to be the White Power Lite party. Every step of the way, the other side had our votes for every tightening of the noose of the carceral state, because while we deplored the Willie Horton ad, we sure were 110% in favor of Law and Order. We have always been 110% for “securing our border”, even if we are foursquare against the idea that the people who are crossing that border without documents are in any way people we need protection from.

Yes, this is the first election in my experience whose result has made me think that I need an escape plan. No, not to activate now, but the range of possibilities is such that I really should start to plan. But this is not at all the first election in my memory in which tens of millions of my fellow countrymen — precisely the people least able to escape — have needed an escape plan, much more clearly and urgently, not as some worst-case scenario.

We’re all in this together. Maybe that will start to dawn on hitherto comfortable people.

Historically, the enforcement of immigration laws in the USA has been relatively lax. Trump, long-time racist and xenophobe, is has promised to deport two million in his first hundred days if he can get the funding, and I see no reason he will not.

If law provided adequate safeguards for sexual assault victims, Trump would long-since have been jailed and we would not be having this discussion. So sexism has protected Trump. Do we need to be messing with hate speech laws when the worst haters are in fact plain criminals who, if laws against various forms of assault were in fact enforced, have long-since been jailed?

@85: Trump sang the song those white voters been waiting to hear. To employ a metaphor used by many already, he discarded the dog whistle and went right for the megaphone/bullhorn. Yes, I think his “message” bore greater weight after eight years of a black president with a powerful and openly ambitious feminist woman running as his heir on the most progressive platform in decades.

Yesterday, elsenet, someone told me that Donald Trump’s sexual assaults were minor, and, besides, Trump had promised to protect “second-amendment rights.” And so, we have elevated a sex offender to the most powerful elected office in the world. I have been saying for years that there are very few things in current politics that are not, at least in part, influenced by masculinity doubts and this is a stunning confirmation of it.

Just how much did the “second-amendment rights” argument influence the election, and how much the sexism, not just in misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton, but in the forgiveness of Trump’s assaults?

This implies policy. First, of course, the feminist argument may reasonably be relied on. Why, during all the madness of this campaign, was the question “Would you leave your teenage daughter alone with Donald Trump?” not asked often? That reaches past the issues of policy to simple human basics and would sway many conservatives. But, second, we need to undertake to change popular thinking about firearms and lethal force, debunking the claim that the Second Amendment was intended as an unlimited firearms license. Rural people who genuinely depend on firearms must also be reassured that their firearms will not be taken away. I know a farmer who routinely defends her chickens from coyotes with a .22, so this is a very real issue for rural people.

I think this election was not lost on policy issues, but on the basics of respect for women and security of life and property. Put another way: in part at least we lost to sexism and the desire of rural people to protect their families and property.

Here’s a point. In Michigan and Wisconsin, had Jill Stein voters voted for Clinton, those states would’ve flipped. In Pennsylvania and Florida, if Stein voters plus a fraction of Johnson voters had voted for Clinton, those states would’ve flipped, and with it the election. Then we wouldn’t be having these long conversations about racism and fascism and the white working class and globalization.

@192
‘Then we wouldn’t be having these long conversations about racism and fascism and the white working class and globalization.’

But we finally had to have a long conversation about the (white) working class and globalization – as we had many long conversations about racism and fascism before.

But the long conversation about the (white) working class and globalization was somehow delayed for so many years.
Bernie Sanders and Trump finally brought this issue up and made it one of the most central issues of their campaigns. And Trump finally won this election with the help of the American Rust Belt – the traditional home of the American worker.

And if the long conversation about the million of Americans – who had been lost to depression and pain killers – would have been delayed again – that wouldn’t have been a good thing.

No, there’s only one factor that makes some Trump votes more crucial than other Trump votes, and that’s the States they were cast in. Within-State, each Trump vote in Maryland had the same weight; each Trump vote in Michigan had the same weight; each Trump vote in Mississippi had the same weight. Votes weren’t more or less crucial because of the incomes of the people who cast them.

On the contrary, this is obviously something that we are never going to find out. It was always obvious that we were never going to be able to compare the performance of President Donald Trump with the performance of President Hillary Clinton.

and in the meantime there are 7 more things to do – courtesy Michael Moore:

1. Must quickly and decisively form an opposition movement, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the 1960s.
2. Prepare to impeach Trump.
3. Must commit right now to a vigorous fight (including civil disobedience, if necessary) which will block any and all Donald Trump Supreme Court nominees who do not meet our approval.
4. Demand the DNC apologize to Bernie Sanders…
5. Demand that President Obama establish a special prosecutor…
6. Begin a national push, while it’s fresh in everyone’s mind, for a constitutional amendment to fix our broken electoral system.
7. Convince President Obama to immediately do what he should have done a year ago…

The Rust Belt is the traditional home of the fantasy-stereotype American worker (who is white, when many American workers aren’t, and male, when American workers are about as likely to be female, and who works in a factory, when most American workers don’t). Thinking in stereotypes hinders people from dealing effectively with the world as it actually is.

At the end of the day, we know that the “white working class” supported Trump much more strongly than it supported Romney, but we can’t tell from polling data if that was because of their judgments about Trump’s policies, their feelings about race, or their feelings about their economic status. In practice, different people in the same demographic group make political choices based on different combinations of those (and other) factors.

I think it’s important to try to understand the relative importance and the interactions of these different motivations, and how those have shifted over time. But if there’s one thing I want you take away, it’s that you can’t answer these questions by looking at aggregate polling data—even though many people will try to do exactly that in the next few days.

@Howard FrantHere’s a point. In Michigan and Wisconsin, had Jill Stein voters voted for Clinton, those states would’ve flipped. In Pennsylvania and Florida, if Stein voters plus a fraction of Johnson voters had voted for Clinton, those states would’ve flipped, and with it the election.

And if Stein hadn’t been on the ballot, how many Stein voters would simply not have voted for a presidential candidate or written-in someone? We don’t know, but if the answer is a very large percentage (which is a reasonable guess), then this analysis fails.

Another Nick@174
“There’s a European country currently talking about rounding up 11 million people from a single ethnic group?”
No, certainly not. Not even if you reckon rounding up, as per cattle = deporting. But is there an European country with an illegal immigrant population, in proportion to its own population, comparable to the US figure? USA is a rather large country by European standards.
And are you are sure that the figure of 11 M applies to a single ethnic group? Unless you define undocumented immigrant = ethnic group.

@faustusnotesLayman, it doesn’t matter how many times you say this. The rhetoric of trump appealing to white working class voters (there are no black ones!) has set in, and all political debate has to revolve around this convenient “fact”.

some of what we know, some of which Layman already said, is, among other things: (1) Clinton won blacks and Latinos, but not by the same margins Obama won them in 2012; Amy Walter (on NewsHour last night) said absolute numbers on African-American turnout were down in e.g. Detroit — a key given Michigan’s close result; (2) Clinton did better than Obama 2012 among white women w college degrees (she won that category, Obama didn’t); (3) Trump did better among white women without college degrees (winning that group, if I have that right) than Romney did. So level of education was an important differentiating factor in how white women as an overall group voted.

Obama 2012 won Pa., Ohio, Wisc., Mich. (and Fla. and NC): Clinton didn’t (though the margins in Pa. and Mich. esp. were very close). No doubt several factors involved here, incl absolute turnout by various groups and percentages won. But that the first four of these are in the (formerly) industrial Midwest wd seem of at least some relevance. A bit higher minority turnout in e.g. Detroit or perhaps Milwaukee, a bit lower white turnout in e.g. the rural/exurban parts of Pa. and Mich., and the election result might well be different. If you look at the overall margins for Trump in some of these states, they’re pretty razor-thin.

Hidari@208: I believe it’s not true poorest voters are the ‘most’ likely to vote for Trump but looks like systematic vote-‘shaming’ does make people hide their votes systematically. This is an interesting metric for what Michael Moore seems to have intuited. Good find.

@191 and 193
Focusing on if Stein voters would have shifted to Clinton thinking is exactly the failure that put Dems in this position in the first place. Had the Dem candidate been on-point with voter concerns and not carried so much dang baggage – there wouldn’t have been any Stein voters that needed to be switched because there would have been a plenitude of support for the Dem nominee.

This is the equivalent of a drunk blaming his alcoholism on the bar staying open too late. Recognizing there’s a problem rather than blaming ‘others’ is the first step to solving it.

That said, truly, a 1% shift in votes in Wisconsin, PA, Michigan or Florida and there’s no conversation to have….everyone would have been high fiving Clinton’s awesome ground game and the repudiation of Trumpism in all its forms.

I meant we wouldn’t be having these conversations here, at CT. Trying to parse out where this phenomenon had come from: is the Trump voter really the white working class, etc. etc.

Yes, if Clinton had won instead of Trump, that would’ve been a very good thing. Surely everyone here understands that by now. No matter how much you scorn Clinton’s “soft neoliberalism”.

nastywoman, no, I don’t think don’t the election of Trump was a reasonable price to paymore attention to the problems of opioid addiction, especially since Clinton was already aware of them. Do you think it was?,

engels, it’s hard to know what would happen without a Democratic Congress. But here’s what I think would happen with it, “after four more glorious years of neoliberal centrism:”

Seriously, and I address this to the whole CT community (or whatever the word is): It’s time to drop the whole idea of “left neoliberalism.” It obscures much more than it reveals. In a group made up of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Paul Ryan, do you really think that the natural grouping is of of Paul Ryan and Hillary, against Bernie? Excuse me, but that’s nuts.

Once the vastly expanded police forces have deported most undocumented aliens…you don’t think they’re going to quit their jobs, do you? Let’s take bets, who are going to be the next targets: (a) journalists who criticize the deportations; (b) Muslims; (c) African-Americans; (d) Jews; (e) women who report sexual assault; (f) all of the above?

I don’t see any way Trump can implement his deportations without turning the USA into a police state.

Now can we please return to discussing how we’re going to stop this madness?

– and this ‘long conversations about the white working class and globalization’ is a curious conversation –
As when I talked to employed and unemployed (white and black) workers in the Rust Belt – and they told me – that they are going to vote for Trump because he promised them to bring manufacturing and their jobs back – and I asked them if they really believe Trump – they told me: ‘At least Trump promised it’.

And shouldn’t that be common knowledge?

That voters tend to vote for candidates who promise them – what they so desperately desire?

“That doesn’t take a constitutional amendment, we just need another dozen or so states to pass the NPV bill. Hopefully there’ll be more of a push for it now.”

If I’m reading that proposal properly, it would require an enacting state to award its electoral votes to a candidate who actually lost that state, if the candidate won elsewhere. In other words, the state must reject the will of its own voters in favor of the will of other states’ voters. Good luck getting a majority of state houses to pass that, or governors to sign it.

Sorry, I missed Lynne’s comment and another one earlier. To be honest, I don’t particularly want sympathy or concern from people who were calling me a racist a month ago because I was worried about the prospect of a Trump presidency. Y’all can keep your worry and sympathy to yourselves.

Which doesn’t apply to Lynne of course. Anyway, it’s awful, and it’s only going to get worse. There’s just no upside here.

Nastywoman@223: what about when they can’t have it? An honest candidate can only promise what they can deliver.

Rhetoric counts. It takes something to say “Blood, sweat, and tears,” and get people to follow you to war. Perhaps that was a Clinton failing. Or perhaps nothing would have helped, in the rhetorical sewer that we have lived in for two decades.

@219
‘nastywoman, no, I don’t think don’t the election of Trump was a reasonable price to paymore attention to the problems of opioid addiction, especially since Clinton was already aware of them. Do you think it was?,’

No it wasn’t – as I can’t think of any ‘reasonable’ price for the election of F…face von Clownstick and sorry about giving you (obviously) the impression that my point about the lost workers was related to the election of Trump.

In my mind it was as unrelated as ‘had Jill Stein voters voted for Clinton, those states would’ve flipped’.

Well we’re dissenters aren’t we? So dissent! Organize, dissent. Organize, dissent.
They want you to submit under the crushing amount of work ahead of you, they’re betting on it. Don’t give it to them. Be heard, you’re not alone.

Sent from a Floridian. I’m in a sea of red for as far as the eye can see, and I’m ready, and even if I’m not, I have to be.

@224
The article von jezebel ends with:
‘One of the worst and most dishonest liberal sayings is “It’s not about race, it’s about class,” as though race and class are not as uniquely intertwined as every other demographic. In this case, though, they aren’t—white people flipped it. It’s about class, it’s about race. And we’re all fucked because of it.’

So what’s about finally concluding: As race and class are uniquely intertwined as every other demographic it’s about both and what Bernie said: ‘tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids—all while the rich become very much richer.”

‘Hillary Clinton lost the US election because of a huge drop in enthusiasm among past Democrat supporters, not because of a surge in popular support for Donald Trump.

With more than 99.1 per cent of the vote counted, Mr Trump’s tally of almost 59.7 million votes is actually lower than either of the previous Republican candidates, Mitt Romney and John McCain.

But in the end that didn’t matter, because effectively almost 10 million Americans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 failed to turn out and vote for Ms Clinton.

It means that, according to the latest figures, turnout is just 51.1 per cent. Though that could rise slightly as the final votes come in, that is currently one of the worst turnouts in modern political history – the fourth-worst since 1932, to be exact.

Opinion polling prior to the election had made it clear that there was a lack of enthusiasm for Ms Clinton. At one point with less than a week to go until the vote, ABC/WaPo polling suggested only 43 per cent of her supporters would claim to being “very enthusiastic” about her as a candidate.

Stephen: And are you are sure that the figure of 11 M applies to a single ethnic group? Unless you define undocumented immigrant = ethnic group.

You’re right, sorry. It was 11 million undocumented immigrants, of which ~7 million are Mexican. “Round up” = cattle, weeds, abstract numbers, take your pick. It was President Trump’s choice of words, not mine.

@Raven Onthill
Trump is going to do a lot of bad things. He’s not going to deport all 11 million undocumented aliens. If you listened to the one long substantive immigration policy speech he gave during the campaign, while there were some ambiguities it was reasonably clear that a deportation of that magnitude was not on the agenda. We should fight real actions that are going to occur, not ones that aren’t going to occur. So when Trump rescinds the Obama exec orders on deportation and starts more targeted measures, those should be opposed. But there’s no point in whipping up a frenzy about an 11-million scale deportation that almost certainly isn’t going to happen. What will probably happen is a series of smaller, more focused measures (e.g. on people w various kinds of criminal records etc), and those measures will be bad enough, esp. if they’re applied sloppily and w/o even minimal regard to procedural forms.

Layman in 170 said: `This is a particularly poor argument, akin to saying “…since Obama won the 2008 Idaho Democratic Caucus by 62 points over Clinton, he had a better chance to win the general election in Idaho.”’

Actually my argument is a particularly good one. Your false equivalence is a classic straw, since that is not what I’m saying.

What I am saying is two things. First, Obama in 2012 would have beaten Trump in 2016 in the electoral college. See this article for county-by-county numbers:

If racism were the explanation for voters voting for Trump, wouldn’t more of those racist voters have been likely to vote against Obama (who, you may have noticed, is black) in 2012?

If there’s a vast hidden reservoir of voters in America who are motivated purely by race hatred, then running a black guy for president is pretty much waving a red flag at a bull, and you would expect an enormous backlash from our allegedly hyper-racist American population. Instead, Obama did well in many counties where Hillary Clinton lost. This suggests that the “it’s just racism” argument fails to explain the 2016 election.

Second, I am not saying that just because deep red state voters voted for Bernie Sanders in large numbers that therefore Hillary should have won in those red states. We all know that in many red states, most of the voters vote overwhelmingly Republican. Also, many red states (like Texas) have strong epicenters of Democratic voters (Austin) that get overwhelmed by Republican rural voters elsewhere.

No, what I was pointing out is that the two candidates who set the electorate on fire were the two populist candidates, Trump and Sanders. And my argument that Hillary failed because she didn’t set the Democratic base on fire is based on hard evidence. The evidence clearly shows that it was low Democratic turnout that was to blame for Hillary’s loss. Take a look at this graphic:

Trump didn’t win the election because some mysterious horde of racist white morlocks rushed out of their underground lairs to overwhelm the poor defenseless Democratic eloi. Trump did not succeed in growing the Republican base, and the evidence shows that clearly. Hillary lost because she failed to turn out her Democratic base in number equal to Obama in 2012.

Let’s get specific: Hillary failed to energize blacks and she failed to energize hispanics to the same extent that Obama did. Just look up the thread and you’ll see the numbers. Hillary performed 7 percent worse among blacks than Obama did in 2012, and 6 percent worse among Hispanics.

Now, why did the Democratic base not turn out in numbers as large as the Republican base? The simplistic and conveniently false argument we’re hearing from the elite Democratic professionals is that “it’s all racism.” This conveniently absolves those elite Democratic professionals. After all, if the problem is ignorant hillbilly rednecks, well, what can you do? If, on the other hand, the problem is that Hillary had no populist message that resonated with the public, whereas Trump did, then the blame falls squarely on the Democratic professional class for nominating her and crushing Sanders’ bid for the Democratic nomination.

We can infer that the answer is not racism because Obama carried a number of Rust Belt states in 2008 and 2012 that Hillary failed to carry in 2016. If all those racist morlocks were rushing out of their hidey-holes to vote for white supremacy, wouldn’t you expect them to vote against the black guy in 2012?

My point that a surprising number of deep red counties voted for Sanders in the primaries is a great argument, because it goes like this… The deep red states voted for Trump and Sanders in surprisingly large numbers in the primaries. Then the foolish ignorant Democratic professional-class elites strangled Sanders’ candidacy, leaving only Hillary as the nominee. When the general election rolls around, the deep red states that went for Obama in the previous election now have a choice between Trump (who is running as a populist and a change agent) and Hillary (who is running as a “more of the same” status quo candidate.

In 2012, those red states picked the change agent — Obama. In 2016, those red states picked the change agent again — Trump. The fact that Obama is black makes it particularly easy to dismiss racism as the self-serving and dishonest sophistry it is. The racism charge is designed by Democratic elites to absolve themselves of any responsibility for running the Democratic party into the ground and turning the party of FDR into a claque of corporatist whores who deep-throated every military-industrial defense contractor and giant monopolistic multinational they could find.

We can expect a lot more phony spin by the Democratic elites explaining in elaborate detail why they bear no responsibility for this election fiasco. Lots of long words with Greek and Latin roots will get tossed around to explain why it was racism. Or it was uneducated rubes. Or it was gun nuts. Or it was rural hicks. Or it was [fill in the self-serving excuse designed to marginalize anyone who doesn’t have an advanced degree and live on either of the two coasts of America].

The reality is that Hillary was a damn poor excuse for a Democrat. Someone who only gets passionate when she yells that single-payer health care “will never, ever happen” is not someone you want your party to run in a change election…and make no mistake, this was very definitely a change election. The other reality is that the Democratic party has been taken over by smug top-four-percenters who don’t give a damn about anyone who is blue collar or not in some way accredited or credentialed with the requisite advanced degree or law degree or M.D. People in impoverished rural areas know that, and reacted accordingly.

I have heard things like engels above (“build a genuine opposition to the power of capital, based on class”) for years but the people who say it never give a “how” or a “with whom”, let alone how to do it “quickly”. In a thread about what we do now this is especially frustrating. I want to know how to build such an opposition in a way that works and cuts through the fog of Americas prevailing racism and its deep misogyny, but no one here or elsewhere has a clue how.

Abolish the racist Electoral College. No really. Don’t just talk about it, like you always do. Do it.

Where by “it” in “do it” you mean “push both houses of Congress to pass an amendment to abolish the Electoral College and, if it passes, push three-quarters of the state legislatures to ratify the amendment”. That’s about all the “it” that “liberals” can do here, and neither Congress nor state legislatures in the US are exactly filled to the brim with liberals, so, even if it’s worth trying, it stands a good chance of failing.

And then abolish (or make elected) the preposterous unelected ‘Supreme’ Court.

Ditto. Either action would require a constitutional amendment.

As long as we’re proposing amendments, how about getting rid of the de-jure-not-racist-but-de-facto-used-to-reinstate-effective-black-slavery-post-Civil-War “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” clause of the 13th Amendment?

I watched one of Trump’s last speeches before the election. In it, he said, “Tomorrow, the working class takes back this country.” I was struck. No contemporary Democratic politician would (or could, credibly) say those words. Afraid of scaring off their donors or being red-baited, most Democrats won’t even utter the phrase “working class”—preferring the capacious and increasingly meaningless “middle class” or, at best, “working families.” But Trump said it. His rural and exurban white supporters have a class consciousness of sorts. They despise elites. They feel that the system is rigged. But that antipathy is entirely entangled with their fear of a black president, of eroding racial and gender hierarchies, and their perception that multi-cultural elites are helping minorities at their expense. Trump can say “working class” because everyone in his audience hears the unsaid word “white” preceding it. It is, as it has ever been, the left’s task to build a mass political movement where there are no words silently preceding the term “working class.” It’s not hyperbole to say that everything depends on it.

Raven Oathill suggests in #229: “Or perhaps nothing would have helped, in the rhetorical sewer that we have lived in for two decades.”

Why not go all the way and face the uncomfortable truth?

Americans don’t want what progressives and Democrats are selling. They say they do in polls, but they’re lying. We saw this with the election polls. Americans never told the pollsters how they were really going to vote, either because they’re embarrassed or because they decided to tell the pollster what they think the pollster wants to hear.

In reality, Americans want oligarchy. Americans want apartheid. Americans want deregulation of banks and giant corporations. Americans want lower taxes on the rich. Americans want regressive taxes on everyone else. Americans want polluted air and toxic water and poisoned food. Americans want poor people punished and imprisoned and brutalized for the crime of being poor. Americans want people who can’t afford to pay vast sums for health care to die in the streets. Americans want to crush women and turn back the clock, remove their ability to vote, and flog them if they get raped. Americans want to ban abortion. Americans want endless unwinnable foreign wars. Americans want torture. Americans want to shred the bill of rights and substitute Star Chambers where victims gets prosecuted on the basis of secret laws using secret evidence in secret trials that the accused is never privy to. Americans want black prisons where detainees vanish without a trace. Americans want propaganda that tells them they’re the greatest nation in the history of the world. Americans want panopticon survveillance of all citizens 24/7/365. Americans want a militarized garrison state that operates under undeclared martial law. Americans want the abolition of the divide twixt church and state. Americans want witch trials, guilt by association, an endless Grand Inquisition misnamed “the global war on terror,” and the punishment of children for their parents’ crimes.

Why not admit it? The polls have spoken. The evidence is clear. Americans have tried the Great Enlightenment, and they dislike it. They want to go back to the middle ages, with some nifty new hi-tech frissons lathered on top.

When you’re faced with a population so degraded and so debased, there’s nothing a progressive party can offer them that will entice votes. The Democratic party can either offer an even crueler and more savage new Grand Inquisition, or it can disband. The people have spoken.

And maybe introduce more judges. If there 5 judges presiding, but chosen randomly from a total of 12, it would solve some of the existing problems.

If the Wikipedia article for the German Federal Constitutional Court is to be believed, it has a 12-year term limit (and mandatory retirement at 68), and is divided into “two senates, each of which has eight members, headed by a senate’s chairman”, with the members of each senate “allocated to three chambers for hearings in constitutional complaint and single regulation control cases”, and with each chamber consisting of three judges. (Sounds complicated, but perhaps it’s very carefully designed to avoid problems. Not that this matches any stereotypes about Germans…. :-))

Honestly, all I see in this comment section are excuses not to tackle the difficult jobs question. You all scream that everyone who disagrees with you is racist, that losing a big chunk of working class voters didn’t cost you this election, that ‘economic anxiety’ is just code for hating the darkies. But you’re all lying to yourselves.

The truth is, the middle class is dead and now even the working class is dying, and none of you has even the slightest idea how to deal with that. So you say that we’re all racist goblins who deserve to suffer to alleviate your consciences. You say that it’s not a real problem electorally to convince yourselves that it won’t matter. But even if we are racist goblins, we vote. I voted for Gore, for Kerry, for Obama the first time…and then nothing till Trump. Call me a racist all you want. I’m just sick of you people pissing all over people like me because you just can’t admit to yourselves that you helped fucked us in the 90s with NAFTA, and then again in 2009 by refusing to pass the EFCA like you promised.

I might add that I think it’s a waste of time to sit in judgement on the parties, politicians, races, classes, and so forth who got us to this point, or didn’t. It looks like we will soon have objective, material, concrete problems which will have to be dealt with. Find out who will help you deal with them, who you can help. Stay awake and stay grounded.

Just got through looking at a string of dozens of Twitter stories of verbal, or occasionally physical, assault in Trump America: girls having their hijabs pulled off, a Hispanic woman being told she would be raped before she was deported, blacks being called nigger, Chinese Americans being told to go back where they came from, some guys on the subway trying to grab a woman’s pussy, etc.

But here’s a strange thing: I haven’t come across a single incident of someone bullying a banker, or a manager who closed a plant. It’s almost like they don’t care,

What do you suppose that means?

Trader Joe@213

That said, truly, a 1% shift in votes in Wisconsin, PA, Michigan or Florida and there’s no conversation to have….everyone would have been high fiving Clinton’s awesome ground game and the repudiation of Trumpism in all its forms.

Yes. Thank you, this is what I was trying to say. It’s always easy with hindsight to tell a story about why any outcome was inevitable.

Layman@226

And yet, it’s been passed by states with 165 electoral votes. The main obstacles: strangely, Republcans don’t like the idea, and neither do swing states.

If all voters had voted Democrat, Trump would have lost. So your stated formula provides no basis for distinguishing between voters who are crucial and voters who are not crucial. By your formula, all voters are crucial, which is a conclusion I’m comfortable with.

‘The Rust Belt is the traditional home of the fantasy-stereotype American worker’

That’s why I spend a lot of time there – interviewing American workers – and I found out – even if the landscape was as ‘stereotypical’ as can be the workers weren’t.

If you spend time interviewing a cross-section of workers from all over America, you will find that they are not much like the fantasy-stereotype of American workers.

If you spend time interviewing a cross-section of workers from the Rust Belt only, you will still find that they are not much like the fantasy-stereotype of American workers, but you will get a less accurate impression of what American workers are actually like than you would if you did the same thing all over the country.

If you spend time interviewing only white male factory workers from the Rust Belt, you will still find that they are not much like the fantasy-stereotype of workers, but you will get an even less accurate impression of what American workers in general are actually like.

If you focus your attention on the Rust Belt because you think American workers are disproportionately concentrated in the Rust Belt, you are operating on a mistaken assumption: American workers are spread out roughly proportionally across all regions of the country.

If you focus your attention on the Rust Belt because you think Rust Belt workers are highly representative of American workers generally, you are operating on a mistaken assumption: the characteristics of American workers vary significantly across regions of the country.

If you focus your attention on the Rust Belt because it is the traditional home of the fantasy-stereotype of American workers, your assumption is correct, but why are you paying attention to fantasy-stereotypes?

If you focus your attention on the Rust Belt because you happen to have easy access to it, you have a practical justification for your approach but no epistemological justification for assuming, or for concluding, that Rust Belt workers are representative of American workers across the country.

In the spirit of answering the “what can we do?” question, I would like to add the following slightly self-contradictory advice: get the fuck out of Twitter, Facebook and blog comment sections and physically in whatever organ of local government is the first around you to mostly deal with people who are not college-educated professionals earning 100,000$ a year or above (for most people, the local council of your town will do just fine but if you happen to live in one of the islands of prosperity and culture, then you might have to go to county or even state level).

Local governments are usually looking for people to participate, so it is not hard to get in, and once in there is a lot you can do (or at least, document how what you wanted to do was blocked and by whom).

So, I’ve read the comments on this thread and others, and had a chance to skim the ‘explanations’ for the defeat.

Here’s mine: people here treated the battle against Trump with all the humility and care of Dick Cheney invading Iraq.

Naysayers were attacked, ridiculed, insulted, shunned, mocked and defamed in every way possible up to and including requests for banning. Not that I mind.

Let’s pretend for a moment that we really believe Trump is Hitler and that his election represents an ‘extinction level’ event for democracy in America. We care about about African-Americans and other minorities, or so we say. In particular, we understand that African-American turn out is critical, if not essential, to the election of the better candidate. What did we do?

In the clearly-forgotten words of Bob Dole: clearly, not enough.

African-Americans are, in my view, treated every bit as poorly by those who claim to care as by those who openly don’t. The difference is that those who pretend to care are extremely careful to avoid any language, or behavior, that will signal their real level of ‘care.’

In the above linked interview with Arlie, she recounts asking an older, white male to described high-school integration as he experienced it. He reports that first there was ‘one’ and by graduation half the class was ‘them.’ Arlie asked ‘and did you make any new friends among this new community? His response: silence followed by ‘now, you’ve got me thinking.’

Arlie, of course, then asks the same question of herself. And recommends others do, too. I choose to live in an entire community of others in a culture that is as ‘foreign’ today, as it was when I arrived many years before. I’m certain that many here have similar stories.

The election evidence, however, suggests that there are many more who cannot. When I and bob m, I think, first suggested that life for African-Americans under Obama last year, the response was shock, disbelief, and mostly silence.

Had this election been an ‘extermination level’ event would ‘liberals’ really have allowed African-Americans to stay home, the ‘stakes’ being what they are? If ‘liberals’ care about African-Americans, why not more support for charter schools, data be damned.

If African-Americans want to be freed from an education system who is it precisely who keeps these Americans in chains, serving the needs of the teachers’ unions and the education system, bureaucracy, etc? This is just one example of ‘liberals’ not listening to the wishes of substantial sections of the African-American community. The re-election of Obama III would have meant a continuation of the status quo, a status quo that probably looks to be ‘in need of improvement’ tweaks, etc., but that is killing African-American families and communities.

Consider what constitutes a ‘victory’ in Obama’s America, and one celebrated here: an African-American university graduate ‘wins’ the right to return to work as a dishwasher at Yale.

That’s progress?

African-Americans expect and deserve something very different.

Here’s a question: if lifting African-American out of poverty meant supporting a Trump infrastructure project, would you support the new president? Allowing more charter schools? Allowing aggressive policing in high-crime neighborhoods?

There’s a high probability of failure in all Trump touches, both from ineptitude and from the wilful obstruction of elites. There’s also sliver of a chance he can make lives better for the poorest and work out a deal to provide documentation for large communities without.

Of course, that would mean the destruction of the GOP as we understand it. Liberals are either going to do something more to build bridges with those outside their bubble, or find themselves scripting lefty defenses for petit-bourgeois self-interest.

A minor correction. There are six States that went for Obama in 2012 and for Trump in 2016, and you’ve got five of them right (Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), but the sixth was Iowa, not North Carolina. North Carolina was one of two States (Indiana was the other) that went for Obama in 2008 but for Romney in 2012 (both went for Trump in 2016).

Since the US election, I have been receiving quite a lot of communications through social media about what was wrong with Hillary Clinton. Most of it comes from guys on the left, mainly in the under 40 age group.

The tone of their comments reminds me a lot of comments I used to see on political blogs in Australia from left wing guys (though a slightly older group) about what was wrong with Julia Gillard. In both cases these men are bitter towards a woman who has defeated a man (their preferred candidate) in a way that they see as illegitimate and devious.

In both cases there is a slightly fanatical tone, which sounds to me somewhat as if they are talking about witches. It seems they don’t see the women concerned as a fallible human beings but as beings are only bad – as beings (they don’t really seem to see them as people) who manipulate people and situations for their own ends, which are always bad.

Whether it be allying with mining companies to defeat a legitimate Prime Minister and institute a neoliberal order in Australia, at the behest of shady others, or rigging the primaries to defeat Bernie Sanders, in order to keep arming terrorists and ultimately plunge the world into world war three, the intention of these woken is seen as both bad and incapable of logical analysis or human understanding – as purely malevolent, driven by ambition, but never for good ends.

These things are being said by men who are in other respects normal, intelligent and often likeable people.

I honestly don’t think that the left can be repaired until we can understand what makes men feel like this about women.

“what can progressives do?”
Actually, it’s quite easy to answer that question.
Wait two terms, then go with a candidate (any candidate: a blind squirrel, the mummified corpse of Hillary, the grandson of Stalin…), and win the election.
That’s what the Republican did, and it worked.

@250
The purpose to interview people in ‘The Rust Belt’ – the traditional (stereotypical) home of American workers was to find out – what the traditional (stereotypical) American worker wanted.

And their answers made clear that they wanted their jobs back – and the return of manufacturing and that they would vote for anybody who promised them that.

And as we all know – Michael Moore knew that -(when he predicted Trump ‘winning) – and Bernie even if he didn’t predict Trump winning knew it – and very ‘sadly’ Trump knew it – as he said in his speeches:

And the strange thing – we seem to be looking for every other possibility like one of the Union Organizers – I also interviewed in the Rust Belt – who got very upset, that so many of his members went over to Trump.

And so – in conclusion I would like – again – to suggest to listen – not to me – but perhaps to the voters of the Rust Belt and somebody like Michael Moore – who predicted that if WE lost the Rust Belt WE have lost the election – and now at least came out with some constructive suggestions about: What to do!

Then you have the ‘Supreme’ Court with its no term limits (y’know like a 3rd world country President), and the racist Electoral College (and the problems created by this are only going to get worse as the US becomes increasingly urbanised, make no mistake about that).

Not to mention the Presidential office itself. In most countries of course the President or Head of State is a mainly ceremonial post: only in the US do you essentially have (at least vis a vis foreign policy) an elected (or semi-elected) dictator.

None of this even touches on the grotesque rules on campaign financing, dark money etc.

The United States is an oligarchy with some democratic characteristics and all analysis should begin with this. The American political system needs root and branch reform, and achieving this should be Progressive’s first aim. You say it’s difficult? Well was achieving civil rights easy?

Of course if you are not interested, if you think the current system is working just fine, come back to me after 2 (or maybe 3 or 4, who knows?) terms of President Trump and we can talk further.

The purpose to interview people in ‘The Rust Belt’ – the traditional (stereotypical) home of American workers was to find out – what the traditional (stereotypical) American worker wanted.

Interviewing workers in the Rust Belt is a strategy of maximum value if you want to find out what workers in the Rust Belt want, a strategy of strictly limited value if you want to find out what American workers generally want (because workers in the Rust Belt are not a representative sample of American workers generally), and a completely useless strategy if you want to find out what the fantasy-stereotype of the American worker wants.

And as we all know … “Tomorrow, the working class takes back this country.”

And the strange thing – we seem to be looking for every other possibility like one of the Union Organizers – I also interviewed in the Rust Belt – who got very upset, that so many of his members went over to Trump.

There’s nothing strange about union organisers being upset when they observe some of their members supporting Trump; that’s entirely natural and predictable. There’s also nothing strange about examining possibilities. Examining many possibilities is an aid to gaining understanding; sticking to one possibility and refusing to examine others is a hindrance to gaining understanding.

And so – in conclusion I would like – again – to suggest to listen – not to me – but perhaps to the voters of the Rust Belt and somebody like Michael Moore – who predicted that if WE lost the Rust Belt WE have lost the election – and now at least came out with some constructive suggestions about: What to do!

Michael Moore’s suggestions are not constructive; they are about as constructive as suggesting that what we need to do is get hold of the sampo and some alkahest.

‘On Thursday, Democratic Party officials held their first staff meeting since Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss to Donald Trump in the presidential race. It didn’t go well.

Donna Brazile, the interim leader of the Democratic National Committee, was giving what one attendee described as “a rip-roaring speech” to about 150 employees, about the need to have hope for wins going forward, when a staffer identified only as Zach stood up with a question.

“Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?” he asked, according to two people in the room. “You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself.”

Some DNC staffers started to boo and some told him to sit down. Brazile began to answer, but Zach had more to say.

“You are part of the problem,” he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump’s victory by siding with Clinton early on. “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”’

and excuse me If I have to last not least – connect a ‘Calexit’ to the idea of J-D that ‘people in the Rust Belt are much the same mix of workers and non-workers as people all over America.’

No they are NOT! –
As we also have interviewed workers in California – and as different as the election results from California are to the election results from Americas Rust Belt – so are the workers .

And let me just quote one worker who immigrated from the Rust Belt to Lalaland and jokingly told us:
In Detroit I was proud to be a ‘worker’ – in LA I have to tell everybody it’s just a transition job.

And such a statement perfectly illustrates – that with the US being so amazingly diverse – and at the same time so terribly segregated – that you can live somewhere in the many isolated communities where you never meet anybody outside of your bubble.

And if it’s a reasonable wealthy bubble there seems to be no reason at all to ask yourself right now: ‘What can we do’?

You have looked at the Dow Jones of yesterday – and stoked you go Surfing.

and about
@260
‘Interviewing workers in the Rust Belt is a strategy of maximum value if you want to find out what workers in the Rust Belt want,
a strategy of strictly limited value if you want to find out what American workers generally want (because workers in the Rust Belt are not a representative sample of American workers generally), and a completely useless strategy if you want to find out what the fantasy-stereotype of the American worker wants.’

How true.
That’s why we NEVER wanted to find out what the fantasy-stereotype of the American worker wants.’

That’s why we focused just on the workers of the Rust Belt.
-(even if we talked to a few workers – originally from the Rust Belt – in California too)

The other thing I can say, following up my earlier message, is that when the left tore itself to bits here in Australia in the Rudd-Gillard wars, and our RWNJ, Tony Abbott, got elected in 2013, is that there gradually emerged an organised resistance.

I think they weren’t even formally left (or didn’t present themselves that way) but they emerged as the March in March movement in 2014. I was still in Germany following my gandson’s birth in March, but I joined in when I came back, and the marches grew following the RWNJ budget in 2014. For the rest of the year, I attended marches pretty much once a month.

The Abbott government declined in polling, and eventually there was a leadership challenge and Abbott was defeated. The guy who has replaced him is a piss weak figure-head, but it was a sign of weakness. The conservatives barely scraped back in at the last election, and they are well down in the polls now.

I can’t say how much our organised resistance contributed to this, but I think it did. So my message is, organise, organise, organise, resist, resist, resist – and don’t fight each other. Forget the silly pejorative terms like ‘identity politics’ and recognise that oppression results from the nexus of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, imperialism and class, however you cut it, and all those things need to be addressed. Work together and don’t give up.

I’m going to be as diplomatic as I can about the lack of gravitas clearly displayed in the comments here as I can, whilst at the same timing reviewing some of the data that many clearly missed.

One of the key reasons I remained confident that Hillary would lose irrespective of what the FBI did, or did not do, if you’re interested, is that I was keenly interested in the attitudes of African-American voters from the outset of this election. As I’ve said throughout, I do not regard Trump as a ‘Republican’ in anything like the conventional sense of the word, but rather see him as a New York celebrity vulgarian with liberal inclinations. Trump from the outset had a clear plan to appeal to African-American voters, even it was far from fleshed-out. And given the ‘of course, African-American voters will support the Democrat’ attitude of practically every white supporter of Hillary, I was confident Trump wouldn’t need much of a plan beyond saying: ‘vote for me, what have you got to lose?’ to do fairly well no matter how badly he was smeared.

Turns out I was right. Low black turn-out numbers in key states, such as Michigan, NC, and Florida came as no surprise to me because I watched Leslie Wimes one week before the election explain that it was ‘already over’ for Hillary in Florida.

Not one to mince words, Ms. Wimes, who voted early for Clinton, reports that she warned the Clinton campaign and the DNC as early as September that black voters in Florida were not, repeat not, going to be turning out in sufficient numbers to permit Hillary to carry this critical state. But nobody wanted to hear. Funny, that.

mclaren: “No, what I was pointing out is that the two candidates who set the electorate on fire were the two populist candidates, Trump and Sanders.”

You’re abusing the term ‘the electorate’. ‘The electorate’ in a primary (or a caucus!) is a different thing than ‘the electorate’ in a general election, and results in one don’t translate into results in another. The point of the Obama Idaho 2008 example is this: Obama beat Clinton by 60 points in that caucus, but this did not mean he was going to win Idaho in a general election, and in fact he got trounced there in the general election. This is because, again, ‘the electorate’ is a different thing in those two contests. No one knows if Sanders would have done better in this general election, and primary results don’t provide an answer to that question.

“Not to mention the Presidential office itself. In most countries of course the President or Head of State is a mainly ceremonial post: only in the US do you essentially have (at least vis a vis foreign policy) an elected (or semi-elected) dictator.”

Under law, the US President isn’t a dictator, even on foreign policy. S/he can’t make or break a treaty, make war on a country, or even buy the bombs to do so without the expressed approval of the Congress. The problem is not the structure, it’s the abdication by Congress of those responsibilities, which in practice have allowed recent Presidents to exercise more power than the Constitution grants. Nature abhors a vacuum.

(The enumerated powers of the Presidency don’t seem substantially greater than those of a Prime Minister to me; if you think they are, maybe you could elaborate on that.)

kidneystones: “African-Americans are, in my view, treated every bit as poorly by those who claim to care as by those who openly don’t.”

Perhaps this will be deemed too personal by the moderator(s), but:

Only someone who is not an African-American could possibly make such a claim. And how does this truth manifest itself? Do people who choose to teach in poor schools ‘treat’ African-Americans ‘every bit as poorly’ as cops who shoot them on arrival at the scene? Is there, truly, no difference in treatment?

“what can progressives do?” Actually, it’s quite easy to answer that question. Wait two terms, then go with a candidate (any candidate: a blind squirrel, the mummified corpse of Hillary, the grandson of Stalin…),

One extremely local thing we could do would be to try, again, to have a CT thread on positive agendas for a more-than-feebly-social-democratic global left, without it immediately dissolving into US election commentary, internecine warfare, micro-feuds over brocialism, etc. It’s a crazy plan, but it just might work.

New Zealand, ’cause it’s the first one I found. That’s… not a lot of power: prime ministers have essentially no imperium, just lots and lots of auctoritas. If you check the constitution you’ll see even less, probably nothing-at-all.

1) make temporary appointments when Congress is in recess;
2) commission military officers;
3) demand reports from executive branch officers;
4) call Congress into an extraordinary session, or adjourn it from such a session.

Tim Reynolds @246Honestly, all I see in this comment section are excuses not to tackle the difficult jobs question. You all scream that everyone who disagrees with you is racist, … that ‘economic anxiety’ is just code for hating the darkies. But you’re all lying to yourselves.

You haven’t been reading all the comments in the thread if you think everyone has been saying this.

I said specifically upthread that the fact Trump carried, albeit very narrowly in some cases, Wisc., Mich., Pa. and Ohio, states (esp the latter three) impacted over a long stretch by deindustrialization, was not coincidental (I didn’t use precisely that language, but that’s clearly the import of what I said, if you go back and read the comment). I think racism/xenophobia was one factor in his support, but not the only one. I think some others here pretty much agree on that.

So your assertion that everyone here is screaming racism to the exclusion of all other explanations is incorrect and evidence that you are not actually reading the comments fairly but rather taking a selection, i.e. cherry-picking to suit your prior assumptions about what the attitudes here “must be”.

One extremely local thing we could do would be to try, again, to have a CT thread on positive agendas for a more-than-feebly-social-democratic global left, without it immediately dissolving into US election commentary, internecine warfare, micro-feuds over brocialism, etc. It’s a crazy plan, but it just might work.

You are mostly right, but with due respect to the original poster, it is kinda soon. The terrain and the forces are yet to be determined. Reorganization and an assessment of remaining resources is required. History and theory must be reexamined. Some people think the Democratic Party needs immediate takeover, but Donna Brazile isn’t gonna get stronger in the next year. We got nothing but time.

It is difficult to balance the local and global on a site like this, but everybody should probably keep the nature of the place in mind.

mclaren @239The other reality is that the Democratic party has been taken over by smug top-four-percenters who don’t give a damn about anyone who is blue collar or not in some way accredited or credentialed with the requisite advanced degree or law degree or M.D.

The idea that an advanced degree is the magic talisman distinguishing (self-perceived or other-perceived) elite coastal types from (self-perceived or other-perceived) non-elite types in ‘flyover country’ is demonstrably incorrect. For instance, there are well-known journalists, e.g. correspondents for high-brow magazines and ‘establishment’ newspapers, who have bachelor’s degrees but no advanced degree. That alone is enough to disprove mclaren’s fixation on advanced degrees as the talisman distinguishing the ‘elites’ and his rather delusional notion that ‘the elites’, esp in the Dem party, look down on anyone who doesn’t possess an advanced degree.

That said, it’s true that too much emphasis in U.S. society is placed on educational credentials, esp. when it comes to getting entry to certain career ladders, and not enough on actual skills and other personal qualities. (Of course the structure of some professions is such that, e.g., if you want to be a lawyer you have to go to law school; a century ago it was still possible to become a lawyer by reading law in a law office, i.e. a kind of apprenticeship, but that’s, afaik, no longer the case.)

The Reynolds-style ‘you’re all saying [something a lot of you are patently not saying]—wake up!’ drive-by has been a feature of these kinds of threads from time immemorial.

Anyway, I sought of agree with Francis Spufford but I also think it’s a bit unrealistic to think you can disentangle the ‘positive agenda’ question from judgments about what went wrong, and the liberal-socialist antagonism, which is certainly also present in the political world outside CT (albeit in a less clownish form), and which looks more and more to me like a yawning chasm.

I agree with Z that for those who really care about these issues, this doesn’t seem like the best place to focus their time and energy.

Agreeing with everything said by LFC in#280. Certainly many people are still not in a good place after eight years of slow recovery; in this respect Clinton’s defeat can also be seen as a partial rejection of her boss, since traditionally putting the heir in power has been a marker for a popular presidency.

Also, @246, don’t forget that some of us where also whingeing about sexism.

@239: Clinton is a decent Democrat who ran to the left of Obama. She is not and never has been the superstar he was. The Democratic Party has a perennial issue with getting portions of their base out when it’s an off-year election and also when the presidential candidate is okay but doesn’t send a thrill up their leg.

~45m of the actual talk (for a bright change the Q&A is very good). His Scottish brogue is of notice to an American but the subtitles are human-made (must be a transcript somewhere, saving time for the speed-reader).

At some point I wanted to qualify a few bits (he may himself given more time), but in general, except for the genius-informed, this will be even of keen interest in parts.

and excuse me If I have to last not least – connect a ‘Calexit’ to the idea of J-D that ‘people in the Rust Belt are much the same mix of workers and non-workers as people all over America.’

No they are NOT! –
As we also have interviewed workers in California – and as different as the election results from California are to the election results from Americas Rust Belt – so are the workers .

Thank you, you have just confirmed my points: (a) people in the Rust Belt are quantitatively much the same mix of workers and non-workers as people in other regions of America, but (b) the characteristics of workers in the Rust Belt are different from those of workers in other parts of America, and therefore (c) it is a mistake to confuse ‘American worker’ with ‘Rust Belt worker’.

I’m with Francis Spufford @271 except that calling for “positive agendas for a more-than-feebly-social-democratic global left” does have an element of belling the cat in it, sort of like asking the oncologist “what now?” after the chemo fails. Of course “positive agendas” are not so ambitious an objective as a new political/economic philosophy and grand narrative with all the trimmings; but on the evidence of what I’ve been reading on these threads for the last several years, it’s plenty hard enough. Does Francis Spufford have some suggestions as to where to start?

I’ve been reading the comments and I think as a community we are doing remarkably well, given the shock and the distressing prospects. We are mourning. That’s a process of discovery as well as release.

It’s best not to try to avoid the pain. Most of us were wrong in our expectations for the outcome in a positive (objective) sense, and almost all of us are distressed by the normative expectations we have for the outcome going forward. This is not the time to double-down on partisan self-deceptions, or stern lectures on other people’s self-deceptions. Blame and resentment are natural enough; let them drain.

Another interesting question that needs to be discussed is the “cleansing” of DNC from Clinton loyalists (the word “super delegate” smells of corruption) and thus weakening the dominant neoliberal wing of the party:

“You can’t tell working people you’re on their side while at the same time you’re raising money from Wall Street and the billionaire class,” Sanders said. “The Democratic Party has to be focused on grass-roots America and not wealthy people attending cocktail parties.”

Sanders acknowledged the need for the party to continue its function as a fundraising vehicle but suggested a model akin to his presidential campaign, which raised much of its money from small-dollar donors.
… … …
Leaders of several progressive groups, who had been courting Clinton as a potential ally on many of their causes, have expressed anger in the aftermath of the election, arguing that the result was a repudiation of a campaign driven by the Democratic establishment.

“The Democratic establishment had their chance with this election,” said Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “It’s time for new leadership of the Democratic Party — younger, more diverse and more ideological — that is hungry to do things differently, like leading a movement instead of dragging people to the polls.”
… … …
Neil Sroka, a spokesman for the liberal group Democracy for America, said Ellison would be “a potentially phenomenal choice” as DNC chairman, but said the organization was open to other choices, provided they weren’t part of the party establishment.

“I think Tuesday night was a tremendous loss that must sit at the feet of the political establishment of a Democratic Party that preordained the primary process from the very beginning,” said Sroka, whose group backed Sanders in the primaries. “The folks that enabled the loss need to step back and let the grass roots lead it.”

In a sign of tension at the DNC, a staff meeting there was interrupted Thursday by a staff member who stood up and blamed Trump’s win on Brazile, the Huffington Post reported.

One telling comment:
PackersFanWisconsin

The Democrats abandoned Midwestern working voters and now they want us back??? Dream on! My town voted Dem for years, they used to care about us, then they want all bonkers social justice white people are all bad and sent all our jobs overseas. We will never vote Democrat again, Democrats betrayed us and they had the nerve to think we wouldn’t notice!

The questions at the end of the OP are important. W/r/t “addressing legitimate concerns” of (some of) those who voted for Trump, I would suggest perhaps beginning with directness of the sort HRC shied away from, along the lines of saying something like: “The economy of the 1950s cannot be recreated in the US by any govt policies that would not also crash the whole global economy (and accelerate planetary climate catastrophe). Most of the lost manufacturing jobs cannot be retrieved; Trump’s promises, implicit or explicit, to do that were an illusion. So let’s consider what can actually, realistically be done to help rejuvenate small-town and rural parts of the country, starting from the premise that there is no magic-wand solution that can be put in one neat legislative package and solve the problems instantly.”

HRC did talk about the need to ensure that that there are expanded paths to decently paying jobs that do not involve traditional 4 yr. college degrees. Also about jobs that could be generated by expanded green energy programs. The latter will be a non-starter under a Trump admin. It will be somewhat interesting to see what, if anything, Trump will try to do concretely for those who provided him the crucial margins in the key states. Because his proposed “solutions” during the campaign were mostly vague blather.

@293: Forgive me, but those of your posts I have seen appear to be, well, rather chipper, no? The hated neoliberal battle-axe and her party have been crushed and now we can start from scratch while the Republicans have another go at wrecking the Republic.

On Wednesday morning I was in an office full of shellshocked women, young and middle-aged alike, some weeping. (I should note they weren’t activists or campaign workers, just a cross-section of ordinary office workers and professionals.) They were in mourning and also angry and fearful. I hope that can be turned into positive energy. For now, it’s just pain.

@295: Those union workers in Wisconsin just cut off their noses to spite their faces, I’m afraid. They have only to look to Kansas to see their future.

Ingrid, thank you for clearing some comments and removing others. I’m a big supporter, btw, of the new comments policy and appreciate the time you and the other contributors take to edit and shape the thread in ways you feel best lead to a more illuminating discussion. I’ll keep this short and then commit myself to reading CT. I very much hope you read the comments removed, in particular, my comment regarding blind spots. I very much look forward to something useful on that topic.

I’m still trying to grapple with the new reality, but two connected facts really stand out

1/ Trump finally broke down the firewall separating Hispanics from joining Republicans in Florida. As we know, the great dream of the Bush/Rubio Republicans is broaden the Republican base to include Hispanics.

2/ Significant subsets of both whites and blacks found little in the Democratic message to bring them to the polls. That many of these voters, especially African-Americans are critical to the Democratic base, this seems extremely significant.

The great risk of ignoring the real plight of working Americans for more than a decade and again in this election is now front and center. From 2004 to 2016, Democrats ran a ‘the Republican is unfit’ campaign, rather than a campaign that addressed the underlying, but steadily growing, inequalities in the US. The Democratic bench is extremely weak, as other commenters have noted.

I very much suspect that Trump will govern as the responsible centrist. Given America’s deep problems and the desire of many Americans to see a growing economy and a brighter future for their nation, I suggest that Trump’s chances of being a good to great president are extremely high.

Naysayers will jeer and hoot at this prospect. Fair enough.

My own view, however, is that Trump does know how to build, and that Trump is dead serious about rebuilding America’s roads, bridges, and airports ‘under-budget and on schedule.’ Smarter Democrats will partner with Trump on these infra-structure projects. As noted in the Telegraph and at TPM, Trump plans to keep at least two key provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

Trump won in large part because Democrats and Republicans both underestimated Trump’s ability to bypass gate-keepers and communicate directly with voters, as he did with Hispanics in Florida, much to the shock and horror of elites and others.

Americans want jobs. A president who delivers on jobs and protects social security and health care is going to enjoy extremely high levels of support among all Americans, especially if Trump allocates significant resources to training and employing minorities in the skilled trades to rebuild America’s inner cities.

Betting Trump hasn’t figured this much out seems to me to be extremely unwise. Nothing would please a narcissist like Trump more than to be the Teddy Roosevelt/Abe Lincoln of the 21st century – a president for all the people.

If that is indeed his dream, I wish him every success. And that really is it from me.

Afraid it doesn’t, though. If Clinton had gotten Stein’s votes, she would’ve carried Michigan and Wisconsin, as shown in your map, which at least would have spared us a lot of teeth-gnashing about how Democrats Ignore The Rust Belt. If in addition she had gotten half of Johnson’s votes, she would’ve carried Florida and Ohio and won the election.

I don’t see any way around it. Not content with 500,000 dead and an eight-year delay on global warming the last time, the Party of the Smug and Self-righteous has once again screwed us.

Tim Reynolds@246Easier to lie and call us monsters.

The problem with this, Tim, is the reality of Trump’s campaign, which was overtly racist in a way not seen in American politics in a long time. That started, of course, in his opening statement, where he talked about rapists coming over the border. We also had his stuff about how Muslims know who the terrorists are, and how should ban them; and about how hellish life is in black neighborhoods. Who was he aiming all this at if not you? And even if not you, which I’m prepared to assume, statements like this would once have disqualifying. But they weren’t for you and your friends, were they?

Kidneystones @252Consider what constitutes a ‘victory’ in Obama’s America, and one celebrated here: an African-American university graduate ‘wins’ the right to return to work as a dishwasher at Yale.
???

Layman @269
,Yes, precisely. It’s going nowhere. If it did go somewhere, it would promptly unravel, since no legislature has the power to bind a future legislature.

The point was only that this is orders of magnitude easier than a constitutional amendment, especially nowadays. In order for it to go somewhere there would have to be a campaign for it. You time-inconsistency point is interesting, but I’m not sure it would be a problem, and if it were there are probably ways around it, like a state constitutional amendment.

So let’s consider what can actually, realistically be done to help rejuvenate small-town and rural parts of the country, starting from the premise that there is no magic-wand solution that can be put in one neat legislative package and solve the problems instantly.

It’s odd, innit, how so many people are insistent that there’s no magic wand to fix the problems associated with blackness in the US but at the same time think that the problems of whiteness can be so-easily magicked away.

@296
‘I would suggest perhaps beginning with directness of the sort HRC shied away from, along the lines of saying something like: “The economy of the 1950s cannot be recreated in the US by any govt policies that would not also crash the whole global economy’…
Most of the lost manufacturing jobs cannot be retrieved.

I would suggest quite the opposite by saying: Yes! Well paying jobs in manufacturing can be brought back BUT not the Trump way.

They have to be brought back the way successful ‘producing countries’ in the world keep them – by refining high quality production and paying their workers the highest salaries –
with all kind of generous perks on top of it – from reasonable full coverage health care to long vacation.

Or as Bernie often said in his speeches – why shouldn’t US workers enjoy what their European friends already enjoy for years.

I suggest you have a long look at the Mark Blyth video at the top of this thread, because he makes a basic point that most commentators are in denial about, which is that there are no easy answers. At all. Because what ‘everyone’ from the Corbynite Left to Trump on the right (i.e. everyone who rejects neoliberalism) want to do is ‘bring back the good jobs’ (i.e. high paid manufacturing jobs for working class men and women) and in a globalised world that is simply not possible. If the jobs can be done in China for less, they will be, and if China gets too expensive, the jobs can move to Cambodia, or Laos, or maybe, in the end, sub-Saharan Africa. They are not coming back to the United States (or Europe) ever, and that’s the key problem:globalisation leads to this, inevitably. It is, therefore, not surprising that almost all of what Blyth calls the ‘Trumpets’ reject globalisation either covertly or overtly. (I suspect ‘anti-immigration’ is such a huge trend at the moment not so much out of racism as such, but because it is the most visible symbol of globalisation).

But modern capitalism IS globalised, in its essence. So you start toying with the idea (which again Blyth touches on) that our current socio-economic set up is simply not sustainable (unless the rich start paying their taxes, which, again, is simply not going to happen).

Moreover, you have got the further confound of global warming. Now that Trump is in power, 2 degrees is going to happen, it’s inevitable, and we might be faced with 2.5, 3, or even more. Just imagine the financial costs of this, the costs to the insurance companies, what it will do to housing, infrastructure, and the State (which it has to deal with not thousands but millions of climate refugees, which will happen in the lifetimes of the younger CT readers). What will this do to ‘global solidarity’ and ‘internationalism’?

Finally I am going to do a Kidneystones and make a wild prediction: now that Trump is in power, assuming he is indeed the wave of the future, I think the EU really is doomed. Or at least the Euro. Obama, and the United States in general, was instrumental in holding the whole deal together, and it’s in Trump’s interests to blow up the EU (or at least, not care whether or not it succeeds or not). The idea that people will want to hold together in the EU to safeguard themselves against the Russian ‘threat’ is typical liberal self-delusion: yeah the Greek Army is definitely going to be mobilised to protect the Poles, after what happened to Syriza. Yeah the British Army is going to do anything at all without open American authorisation (make no mistake, despite the rhetoric, after Brexit British elites are going to push for even more ‘cooperation’ (i.e. subservience) to the United States, whatever they say in public).

So it’s very difficult to see where progressive politics goes from here without really radical ideas (e.g. mass automation coupled with a liveable basic income so that large swathes of the population are permanently unemployed but funded by the State to live as they want, paid for by taxation on rich people) being accepted, and at the moment the audience for these ideas is more or less precisely zero.

Another wild, fact-free prediction: I suspect that in 100 years time this will be viewed as an epochal election, similar to the election of Thatcher or Reagan which really indicated that the old order was dying. As Val, in comment 3 noted (and I note that few have picked up on this) this will inevitably accelerate the already ongoing American decline vis a vis other countries: we have seen it in the emboldenment (if that’s a word) of Putin, and China, Erdogan in Turkey, and Duterte in the Philipines: all of whom feel far more able to stand up to the Americans than anyone comparable would have done 20 years ago. And the EU is just dying, it’s a joke.

So I suspect we will see a lot of instability over the next century, similar to what happened in the 4th and 5th centuries as Rome declined and possible successors jostled for power.

This from a commenter on Dean Bakers Blog:
Ooo-kay ‘Moore’ is the keyword – and you meant to write:
CELEBRATE THE AGE OF TRUMP!! –
Right? – as the monster will initiate – or already has initiated – an economical boom not unlike the boom another monster in history has once initiated – and as it is still ‘the economy stupid’ in ‘our’ homeland – the monster will reap all we sowed!
Keywords: ‘MOORE’! ‘
MANUFACTURING’!!
NO WELL PAYING JOBS FOR WORKERS –
IN A THE TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE JOB MARKET!
– and I don’t mean to scream – but do you still NOT get it?
And you really have to excuse us – if Moore and Me and everybody else who saw it coming since at least 6 years are mad as hell and we are not taking it anymore as we wrote about it – here and there -. and in the comment section of the NYT and everywhere…
And especially when we warned OUR great economical Muckie Muck’s – that Trump was starting to steal ‘our’ constituency – the workers – and our great Muckie Muck’s just yawned and told us – honest to god:
‘The Job market is fine –
‘Bringing Manufacturing jobs back is a illusion’!!
And furthermore: The Rust Belt is not going to decide a election’.
EAT THOSE WORDS!! – for F..face von Clownsticks sake!
and it would be kind of ‘cool’ if the monster only would make Paul Krugman look like a complete fool. But the monster will make – with his ‘boom’ – all progressives and liberals look soooo bad.
He will give Americans the impression – that you have to be a Racist Fascistic Birther or Orange Orang Utan to take care of our countries Working Class!
And HOW bad is that!
-and I’m not saying ‘it’s all your fault’ – but PLEASE next time – when somebody posts a comment telling you: ‘The workers are not happy -and we GOT to do something about manufacturing – take her – or him seriously!
DEAL?!!!
As it’s going to be YUUUGE… absolutely YUUUUGE!
And I already said somewhere else that I ME – was the biggest fool of all – as I honest to god thought we could eke it out one more time by going with Bernies advice to vote for Hillary anyway – but somehow the NYT censored that comment.

(A moderation scheme based on a notion of propriety and fairness which allows people to post blatant falsehoods while censoring those who call them falsehoods is part of the reason we’re saddled with Trump.)

The great manufacturing jobs of the past are being done by machines. They are not coming back. The good administrative jobs of the present are increasingly being done by machines; they will continue to go away and will not come back. The lousy service jobs of the present and future are what we will have, and there will not be enough of them. The future is widespread, persistent un- and under-employment. Trump’s promises are simply lies designed to garner the votes of have-nots in order to advance the interests of haces. I suppose one could argue that Democrats should do the same, but I’ll pass, thanks.

“Hypothetically, if the general election were held today, and the candidates were [Donald Trump for the Republicans] and [Barack Obama if he were allowed to run for a third term for the Democrats], for whom would you vote?
41 Donald Trump
53 Barack Obama
6 Not sure

Hypothetically, if the general election were held today, and the candidates were [Hillary Clinton for the Democrats] and [Mitt Romney for the Republicans], for whom would you vote?
40 Hillary Clinton
50 Mitt Romney
10 Not sure”

LFC@296:HRC did talk about the need to ensure that that there are expanded paths to decently paying jobs that do not involve traditional 4 yr. college degrees.

The demand is there, because demand is infinite. The jobs aren’t, not because the demand isn’t there but because the liquidity isn’t. Everyone’s trying to save, and noone’s spending.

And… money that is spent is rapidly captured in one or another stagnant pool, held by an entity with low propensity-to-spend, a corporate cash-pool or the slush-fund of a high-net-worth individual, who definitionally values cash more than lifestyle. The government can run the presses, but unless it does something about the propensities of these cash pools to grow the multiplier just isn’t there.

So either way the path forward is shrinking the cash piles, forcing people to disgorge their cash. It’s not a complex problem, the solutions are well-understood. Higher taxes, higher inflation.

kidneystones: “Americans want jobs. A president who delivers on jobs and protects social security and health care is going to enjoy extremely high levels of support among all Americans, especially if Trump allocates significant resources to training and employing minorities in the skilled trades to rebuild America’s inner cities.”

‘The great manufacturing jobs of the past are being done by machines.’

– and ‘sadly’ by a lot of high payed workers in Germany, Italy and everywhere were high quality manufacturing is done.
And do you know how many more and other jobs just one high quality manufacturing jobs produces?

Or as a hairdresser from Detroit who now works in Stuttgart Germany told us: The Car outsourcers killed all the hot hair salons in Motown.

@309
‘Much of Europe is in recession, and unemployment is sky-high (and has always been higher than in USA).’

Not in the major economy of Europe – and one of the the main ‘producing economy’ of the World. There the search for workers is so desperate that they have to export workers from all over the world and Europe.

And on top of it – they pay the highest wages and salaries in Europe and in the world.
-(so much about the myth that you only can do manufacturing if you pay the workers terrible wages)

@314
The Germany point is dealt with by Blyth at about the half-way point of the video linked to at the top of the thread. Another key point (i.e. other than the one he makes) about the United States in particular is that it is a MASS manufacturing country that manufactures things (like iPhones) which ‘everybody’ has, not (or not just) a manufacturer of the ‘niche’ electronic and technical things that the Germans tend to concentrate on. And when it comes to these things, generally speaking, they are better assembled by low wage staff, de-unionised staff in countries with little legal protection for workers, ceteris paribus. Of course it may be possible to square this circle, but Germany is unlikely to be a role model for the US in particular for reasons explained in this article here:

(brief resume: Germany rarely if ever produces highly innovative ‘cutting edge’ companies like Apple or Microsoft: instead it concentrates on already existing industries. The United States would look like a very very different country if it ever wholeheartedly adopted the German model).

– agreed – and when I wrote:
“Why shouldn’t US workers enjoy what their European friends already enjoy for years.” –
I tried to point to the fact – that nearly everywhere in Europe all workers enjoy the help they get from their governments and employers – From the affordable health care to the long vacations -(and – before – free education) – even ‘much of Europe might be in a recession, and unemployment might be ‘sky-high’ .

Which is entirely a different issue – as when you would look at the workers participation rate you might come to the conclusion that the workers ‘non’ participation rate in the US is ‘sky-high’.

And to compare economical growth is a bit of a… stretch? – as Europe don’t have the same population growth as the US.

As we sit and wonder at how much of Trump’s own bluster he truly believes, I’m reminded of Jacob Bronowski, 43 years ago, remarking (about the West no less): “50 years from now, if an understanding of man’s origins, his history, his evolution, his progress is not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, we shall not exist.”

Of course we know that Bronowski mean ‘that’ evolution. So does Pence, Carson, Falwell etc.. Does Trump? Does Trump care?

‘The United States would look like a very very different country if it ever wholeheartedly adopted the German model.’

As I don’t think there is a specific ‘German Model’ -(besides the fact that Germany is still mainly a ‘Producing Country’ compared to the predominant Consuming Country – the US)

There is this theory that once upon a time some ‘clever’ US CEO’s got together and decided – that it is not worth anymore to produce ‘stuff’ in the homeland. (Just like these Brits who decided to sell nearly their whole manufacturing to Germany)
And so bit by bit the US halved it’s percentage of 2o percent manufacturing of GDP to about 10 percent.-(in Germany it’s still between 23 and 33 percent – depending on how you define ‘manufacturing’)

So there is this other theory – that an economy which gives up manufacturing -(to such an extent as the US) – and put most of its cards on ‘service’ and ‘finance’ is not sustainable whatever financial tricks such an economy has up its sleeves…

In conclusion – what’s about having the US ‘look like’ the US when the country still produced most of what it consumes.
You know there is no need for US Companies to produce nearly everything outside the country – which in a very ironic (socialistic?) way Trump tries to tell them…

I’m not getting your point. Yes, it’s hard to imagine how we would get rid of the Electoral College nowadays, given current Republican dominance. Is that your point? If so, I’m not sure why we spent so many electrons arguing about it.

I am assuming that most of you would not be seen dead reading a filthy communistic website like the WSWS (and quite rightly so!), so I risked the Forced Labour Camp (AKA Trump University) to bring you this. Source is biased so caveat lector.

‘California state and local government officials reported Thursday afternoon that as many as five million votes remain to be counted in the presidential election. This includes both mail-in ballots postmarked no later than November 8 and provisional ballots cast by voters who went to the wrong precinct to vote because they had moved.
If the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton maintains the 62 percent majority that she has won so far in California voting, the count of all the outstanding ballots would likely increase her popular vote lead from the current estimate of 400,000 to approximately two million votes.
If anything, this is likely to be a low estimate, since provisional ballots are disproportionately cast in low-income and minority working-class districts, where Clinton ran up margins approaching 90 percent. More than one million ballots remain to be counted in Los Angeles County alone, and 600,000 in San Diego County. Clinton won more than 80 percent of the vote in Los Angeles and nearly 60 percent in San Diego.
This means that Clinton, the loser in the Electoral College to Donald Trump, would have a margin in the popular vote exceeding at least three winners of US presidential elections in the last half-century. John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election over Richard Nixon by 112,000 votes; Nixon won the 1968 election over Hubert Humphrey by 510,000 votes; and Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election over Gerald Ford by 1.7 million votes.
Clinton’s margin in the popular vote could be four times the size of Al Gore’s in 2000. Gore carried the popular vote by 540,000 over George W. Bush, only to lose in the Electoral College after the Supreme Court intervened to halt a recount of ballots in Florida.
Up until now the media has said almost nothing about the scale of Clinton’s popular vote margin. A posting by David Leonhardt in the online edition of the New York Times is the only reference in national publications, along with occasional reports in the California-based media.
Trump’s vote total was actually below that won by Republicans Mitt Romney in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2004, and just barely above the total received by John McCain in 2008, when he lost to Barack Obama by a margin of ten million votes.
As the scale of Clinton’s lead in the popular vote becomes more widely known, Trump’s elevation to the presidency will be seen ever-more widely as politically illegitimate.
It is known, of course, that victory in a presidential election is determined by the allocation of votes in the archaic Electoral College. But in the first 211 years of American presidential history, between 1789 and 2000, there were only three occasions in which the presidency went to the candidate who lost the popular vote.
This first occurred in 1824, when—after a four-way contest in which no candidate received sufficient electoral votes to win—the House of Representatives awarded John Quincy Adams the presidency. There was widespread popular outrage over the “corrupt bargain” that denied Andrew Jackson—the winner in the popular vote—the White House. The presidency of Adams remained under a cloud, and Jackson defeated him in the election of 1828.
In 1876, Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden received approximately 250,000 more votes than Republican Rutherford Hayes, but failed to secure the necessary Electoral College majority. After several months of intense negotiations, the Democrats accepted the elevation of Hayes into the White House. However, the Democrats exacted from the Republicans an immense political concession: the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South, which effectively ended the post-Civil War Reconstruction.
In 1888, President Grover Cleveland lost his bid for reelection to his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison. In this case, the Republican candidate won a substantial majority in the Electoral College, but he received approximately 80,000 votes less than President Cleveland. Harrison entered the White House, but the fact that he had lost the popular vote—even though by a relatively small margin—undermined his political authority. Cleveland defeated him in the election of 1892.
For the 112 years after Cleveland’s defeat in 1888, every winning presidential candidate obtained more votes than his rival. Throughout the twentieth century, the results in the Electoral College ratified the outcome of the popular vote.
But two out of the last five elections have resulted in the victory of Republican candidates—Bush and Trump—who lost the popular vote.
George W. Bush’s popular vote deficit in the election of 2000 was significant: approximately 500,000 votes. In Trump’s case, the deficit—which may reach between 1.5 and 2 million votes—will in all likelihood be so substantial that it can hardly be viewed as merely a peculiar anomaly.
The scale of Trump’s defeat in the popular vote underscores the political cowardice that has been displayed by the Democratic Party in its response to the election. Given the circumstances, the Democrats are under no political obligation to do more than acknowledge that Trump, because of his electoral vote majority, has merely won the right to plant his backside in the presidential chair of the Oval Office.’

(so much about the myth that you only can do manufacturing if you pay the workers terrible wages)

Not everybody can do every thing: making a success of high-wage manufacturing requires that you can deliver high per-worker productivity.

Shitty “do what you’re told” management styles that don’t respond to feedback from the shop floor, they use labour inefficiently, wastefully: you can only do this successfully if labour is priced below its value.

[labour management is sort of the canary-in-the-mineshaft, here: labour is one of your biggest costs and represents the bulk of your supply contracts. Shitty management practices generally are going to show up in labour first.]

if Moore and Me and everybody else who saw it coming since at least 6 years are mad as hell and we are not taking it anymore

I’ve seen Network. The man on the television told the people who were watching to go to their windows and shout ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!’; and they did; and it changed nothing.

This week saw a slide show that said, IIRC: “Mercedes is a German car company that doesn’t make cars; parts are manufactured in Eastern Europe and shipped to America for assembly.” What’s more, if they follow the new hands-off supply-chain model, Mercedes won’t own any of the factories but simply create the customer and distribution system. Same with Time-Warner, etc.

put most of its cards on ‘service’ and ‘finance’ is not sustainable

I don’t know. The model I use, from world-systems and elsewhere is partly geographic is a 3 class system

1) Where is the capital, including real estate, housing, rents expressed as monetary value
Let’s say American coasts. London. Dubai. Tokyo
2) Where is the wage labor?
China, Bangladesh, etc
3) Where is and where from the technocratic and managerial, salaried class? Media, cultural, and academia?
4) Where is the lumpenproletariat and reserve army of the unemployed, the enforcement class, soldiers, cops, prison guards, preachers?
Maybe inner cities and rural areas.

This is of course fractal, can be applied to the globe, region or a village. And I can fit colonialism, racism, and feminism in there fairly seamlessly. Super-exploited wage labour is currently largely female. Export Processing Zones. And then I examine the relations among the above classes.

I might have a speculation that if you can physically separate the wage-earning classes from the technocratic class and lumpenproletariat it makes resistance very difficult. Lenin and Mao, whom I am sure our enemies read, believed that class consciousness must be imported from outside.

I’ve been reading the comments and I think as a community we are doing remarkably well, given the shock and the distressing prospects. We are mourning. That’s a process of discovery as well as release.

Oh, for fucks sake. You spent the entire campaign arguing that defeating Clinton was the prime objective. Well, you got your wish. So spare me the fucking “shock and distress”.

Hidari @317
Though there is *some* high-end, specialty manufacturing in the US, it’s not on the German scale and for various reasons, which someone like Blyth or prob. Farrell can explain (frankly I can’t in any detail as it’s been much too long since I had to read some of the relevant stuff). In short, adoption of ‘the German model’ is not easy or v. feasible. (As for Trump, I doubt he even knows what the German model is. His vague pronouncements about bringing about mfg jobs by ripping up trade agreements are 90% empty yammering.)

Absolutely – as we should focus on what he has proposed – and and ‘What can WE do’.

Trump -(like a modern fascist) proposed building walls and charging tariffs but then he promised to have a talk with some US CEO’s – warning – that they get punished if they export jobs or outsource – and this warning is so… so… amazing – that if one of us – or Bernie – would have suggested it – the screams about ‘Socialism’ or ‘Communism’ never would have ended. But now – very sorry to say: Reminding the own CEO’s and the ‘own’ companies – might be one of the most overlooked aspects of something like the ‘German Model’ -(if there is something like that?) – As such a forceful reminder is connected to the simple concept of paying workers – such high wages and salaries – that they can afford ‘the stuff’ they produce.
That’s why a German company like Mercedes Benz sometimes sells over a quarter of the whole production to their own workers.

And if that sounds familiar – you might call it ‘the Ford Model’ –
and if Trump is just partly successful with such a truly ‘socialistic’ part of his plan – it is devastating for us – progressives and liberals – as it gives ‘the people’ the impression – that you have to be a Fascistic Racist to be able to do what supposedly we couldn’t do:
Force US CEO’s to produce (again) in ‘the homeland’ – and thus bring back (some) of the lost jobs.

And about @326 – seeing ‘slide shows that said, IIRC: “Mercedes is a German car company that doesn’t make cars; parts are manufactured in Eastern Europe and shipped to America for assembly.” and all these other arguments – that ‘manufacturing is over’ – as it will be done anywhoo in the future by some low paid workers far away – or some robots…
This is just a distraction from the fact – that a country which doesn’t produce most of the stuff it consumes – could be – ‘OVER’.
As on the Meta level such an ‘unbalanced’ economy can’t be sustainable.

And IF there is a ‘German Model’ – it’s perhaps that Germany generally never could give up manufacturing – even if it didn’t look very good around 2000 – when Paul Krugman wrote his infamous: Why Germany Kant Kompete.

Germany kould compete because the country HAD TO.
There were no other option.
No way – trying to make more dough with ‘Financialization’ or ‘Service’.
And as a fact – whole areas in Germany still live entirely from their car producers -(like once Detroit or parts of the Rust Belt) – and there is so much job creating manufacturing going on inside Germany – that all of this saying, but, but, but – German manufacturers outsource too and produce in other countries is just another distraction.
For sure they do – but it is nothing – compared to the 23 to 33 percent of manufacturing in Germany’s GDP.

And so the fact – that somehow US companies in the aggregate were so insane to give up manufacturing – was entirely suicidal – not only literally – as we all should know the story of the suicidal American workers – but also in killing a once sustainable economy with at least 20 percent manufacturing of GDP.

@328.
Precisely. These things are ‘path dependent’. So even if Germany could do it, it simply does not follow that the US can also do it.

In other words, the jobs are not coming back, either under the democrats or the republicans. And we are all going to have to think what to do about that. If we don’t have any good ideas, I can tell you now, the future belongs to Trump (and the others, even worse, who are waiting in wings).

I’m arguing that it’s a fantasy, because in the actual moment, no state can be relied upon to cast its electoral votes for the candidate who lost in that state, in defiance of the majority of voters in that state, when doing the opposite meets with the will of its voters, just because some past legislature said they would. Imagine a future election in which the Republican will win the electoral college should New York or California honor that commitment. Do you imagine that they will?

A scheme that relies on that outcome is doomed to fail, and pursuing it is a waste of time and effort.

I thought the Blyth video on Global Trumpism was very, very good. People probably found the discussion at Brown between Blyth and political scientist Wendy Schiller post election, but I thought I would link to it.https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI
This is less economics and more pure political dynamics. Schiller is a great foil for Blyth as she mouths a certain brand of centrist complacency and what I imagine is a professional class cliched response. Still, she is also a wonky political scientist and has some interesting insights of her own, but her perspective is micro and she is surprised by the outcome and offers parochial minute and cliched responses like, Clinton paid a price for 24 years of public service and blah blah Latino turnout in Florida etc. So you get Schiller moaning, hoocodenode, and Blyth finally coming in after 12 minutes of looking at his watch and saying, me — I knew, and talking about Trump in the context of Hollande’s collapse and the looming Italian constitutional crisis.

Seeing Trump’s election marking the collapse of the Democratic Party as we have known it for 25 years and perhaps even as a challenge to coastal / urban secular dominance in creating liberal culture is one set of perspectives, and seeing it in world-historical context, with an undercurrent of long-term economics is another.

I was wrong about the outcome. I thought Clinton would hang on to become President, but suffer the system’s continuing political paralysis and a crisis of legitimacy. My own revulsion for Trump played its distorting part, as did the usual prejudice in favor of the future as continuation of the past. But, I always understood that this election marked an inflection point in the political cycle, a turning. I understood that voting for Trump was voting for breaking the system.

I see quite a few people wondering if Trump can make the system work after all. Can wild spending on infrastructure create a boom? Will he repeal Obamacare or just rebrand it? Will he really leave NAFTA? Confirm NATO? (Kind of missing the point — Trump has been hired to shout, “you’re fired!” while keeping the system working — a contradiction in terms that is only possible because of widespread disinterest in how the system works.)

Blyth’s perspective says the world is breaking, ready or not. And, the U.S. may not experience much of the chaos directly, at least right away, because the dynamics of chaos elsewhere drives capital flight to the U.S., which stabilizes property prices and the U.S. economy if no where else.

Schiller says one good thing about the prospect of Republican dominance is that they will be accountable for what happens. I keep thinking of Bush II and disaster capitalism. Was he held to account?

What a question?
No – not at all – wild spending on infrastructure will lead to an economical depression.
(just joking!)
But it’s like the NYT – who has this yuuuuge article today about Carrier – in the paper – and that that the workers of Carrier are now waiting if Trump does – what Trump promised – to save their jobs for getting outsourced.

How awesome – after Michael Moore – after Bernie and Trump – even the NYT discovers ‘the American Worker’?
-(just joking!)

Did I spend “the entire campaign arguing that defeating Clinton was the prime objective”?

That is certainly not how I would characterize any argument I made at any time.

In a discussion, it is certainly a normal procedure to restate an interlocutor’s argument. In a civil discussion, there might be an exchange concerning whether the restatement was an accurate characterization or an unfair caricature, as the case may be.

As far as I am concerned, js. not for the first time aims at me a lie about what I have said, laced with profanity. That may be an expression of anger and hostility, but it does not constitute a point of argument with which I can engage on its merits; in my view, as a lie, the declarative content has no merit, and the profanity et cetera marks out js.’s comment as a bullying provocation.

Anyway I watched the first 40 minutes or so. I followed most of what Blyth said except when at around 39 minutes he appears to say that infrastructure spending is going to be financed by tax cuts. I don’t understand that. Tax cuts don’t finance spending; they in all likelihood reduce revenues and, as Blyth says, “bloat the deficit.”

Now maybe what Blyth meant is: Congress is going to do some spending on infrastructure and instead of tax hikes they’re going to do tax cuts, which won’t finance the infrastructure spending but will increase the deficit.

But what Blyth actually says is (and this is very close to a direct quote): “We are going to spend money on infrastructure and we’re going to do it in the form of tax cuts. Which is going to bloat the deficit and hurt US bonds, but it’s not going to matter b.c there’s nowhere else for [lenders to put money]…. So we’re going to export our problems to the rest of the world as we usually do.”

As spoken, the first sentence of that passage does not seem to make sense, so what he prob. meant was the ‘translation’ I suggested…

Germany doesnt scale. Its a niche that just works for one country of 80 million, not for 300. German gdp per capita is lower than the US one, too. What makes Germany overall a nicer place to live is mainly a more egalitarian income distribution including more egalitarian access to healthcare. The same is true for say France which doesnt have much industry to speak off.

I haven’t heard it said in so many words yet, but I expect we’ll soon be reading about how important it is for everybody to be careful about disrespecting Trump because we know how badly he acts out when he feels slighted.

BW: Was [Bush II] held to account [for his practice of disaster capitalism and the politics of crisis]?’

An: I think that’s why we got Trump.

Indeed.

The narrowing, degenerating dialectic of right Republican neoliberalism with soft Democratic neoliberalism did not leave much room for acknowledging reality or changing policy adaptively. The Democrats lost their credibility in 2009-10 and their ability to recognize the implications of that loss of credibility in the “success” of Obama’s re-election in 2012.

Trump, in his say anything for audience response demagoguery, got a lot of mileage out of just saying seemingly random things that broke the narrow confines of conventional neoliberal dialogue and policy paralysis, that simply wouldn’t work except in that degenerate context. In a larger perspective, I agree with the historian David Kaiser, who wrote:

Trump . . . only became a successful businessman, a tv celebrity, and a presidential candidate because of the bankruptcy of our institutions and values. A sound financial system would have put him out of business decades ago, a healthy culture would have had no place for him, and he would never have been nominated in an age of strong political parties.

The U.S. missed an opportunity to simply and cleanly reverse direction in 2006-8, rejecting the various Bush doctrines, at home and abroad. Then we sowed the wind, now we reap the whirlwind.

Elections have consequences and policy has consequences — if one doesn’t get you, the other will. They are both unforgiving of efforts that do not cross critical thresholds and do not make use of new information as it emerges.

Blyth, generalizing the pattern he sees as common across the U.S. and western Europe, says, “there’s no Left left.”

I may not have got the general trend of arguments on this and other threads right, but it does seem to me that a sometimes popular statement is as follows :

From the USA Democratic Party to workers in the Rustbelt.
You’re screwed.
Your jobs have gone away, they won’t come back, there is nothing you can do about that.
There is nothing that the Democratic Party (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs) intends to do about it, either.
Damn you and damn any of your hopes.
Now come along. obedient voters, do support the Democratic Party as you and your parents always used to do, won’t you?

@339
‘Germany doesnt scale. Its a niche that just works for one country of 80 million, not for 300.’

then let’s finally talk about ‘the most competitive economy in the world’ -(with only 8 million people)
Do you think we would be willing to learn from ‘the most competitive economy in the world’?

Do you think we would start listening or introspect or change anything if we would find out that ‘the most competitive economy in the world’ on top of being ‘the most competitive economy in the world’ also makes the best cheese?